A Walk Down the Memory Lane - Curtain Wall

Christmas is near and it's that time of the year! 

Just thought about my annual Revit greeting card and how I modeled the Revit scene. The use of snow (and snowflake) has been in the background for years. 

Snow and snowflake in the scene

People who see this for the first time often asked how the snow and snowflake are modeled in Revit. This is done by using the Curtain wall tool (seriously!). No Dynamo or any scripting is needed to achieve that. 

This brings up a class I presented at 2012 Autodesk University. I can't believe it has been 10 years now. 

The topic was Unfold the Curtain! Think Outside the Curtain Wall Tool in Autodesk Revit. 

This was my first in-person live presentation at the Autodesk conference. I happened to search for something through the site today, and I am surprised to see the resource files from 10 years ago are still available online. That includes the recorded session!

If you are interested in seeing some creative use of the Curtain Wall tool, head over to the link below and check it out! Many of the techniques I covered are still applicable in Revit. 

No need to sign in to the site. 

Unfold the Curtain! Think Outside the Curtain Wall Tool in Autodesk Revit

If you have issues viewing the content, I have the pdfs saved here via Google doc.

Cheers!

Wall Opening - What's New?

I stumped something new just few days ago as I have never paid attention to the native opening tool in Revit. I wrote this post back in September 2015 about some common methods I use when it comes to creating openings in Revit. Wall "opening tool" is one that is easy to use but has limitation as well as issue with room bounding detection.

What's new in 2017 version is you can apply wall opening while you have the wall selected. It works in both Curtain Wall as well as Basic Wall.

Wall Opening icon is in fact available in Revit 2017. The very same icon was always there but it used to be grayed out in the previous versions.

I am not even sure if Autodesk documented this "improvement" in Revit 2017.

With this easy access to the tool, you can insert an opening to curtain wall more efficiently. I am not a big fan of using this tool but it is quite handy if you need to apply opening to Curtain Wall.
Hope you will find it useful. 😉

Randomize Color and Material in Revit - Dynamo Style!

I made a post almost a year ago about how to use a third party app to randomize color and material for curtain panel in Revit. I have been wanting to do more study on how to this in Dynamo. Dynamo has gained so much attention recently and there are always new builds coming out every other week or so. I saw a post from Zach Kron some time ago and haven't got time to look into that until recently. He even made a YouTube video to show his process. First of all, huge thanks to Zach and now I am able to make my own twist and use that on my Randomized Curtain Panel family and have some fun with it.

Below are some images that show by moving the Integer Slider back and forth to change the color of the curtain panels.

Check out this video to see how the slider works in action:

You can find the sample file in this link also.

Enjoy and more to come later!

Mind Those Reference Planes!

It has been a few months since my last post about some quirkiness on adaptive components. I have this project using adaptive component to populate the building facade which posed some challenge not only with divide path direction; I stumped upon another unusual behavior with adaptive component and thought to write about this as part 2 on my blog.

For this building facade, we are using adaptive component to set up the window wall system module for number of reasons. One particular reason is that this facade has a sloping wall plane. As you might know, traditional curtain wall system doesn't work on non-vertical wall surface at all. One can try to use curtain system but it just doesn't work. Therefore, adaptive component with conceptual massing seems to be the answer for this question.

From the above image, each unit is composed by an adaptive component, there are a few different types of configuration in the facade. As we have modeled the whole facade, I notice something strange happening. Whenever I am trying to use dimension or align tool, these random "axis" started to show up. There are just so many of these axis no matter how many times you hit "tab" key to try to cycle through to something orthogonal to snap to.

I had no clue at first and thought Revit was going crazy on me. Then, I started examining the adaptive panel family and the answer was there.

Adaptive component (AC), just like any traditional family has two default reference planes, called Center (Front/Back) and Center (Left/Right). And by default, they are considered as "Strong reference" once the family is loaded to a project. However, reference planes in AC family do not serve any real purpose since "adaptive points" are taking their place on driving the geometry behavior. Unfortunately, those little reference planes are still pretty "snappy" in the project; and obviously, those reference planes become selectable more often than you expect and they appear at different angles depend on how they interact with the adaptive points as well as the massing.

Well, all you need to do is open the family (in my case, I have a handful of different type of families), select the Center (Front/Back) reference plane, and set it to "Not a Reference". Select the other one "Center (Left/Right)" ref plane and do the same, then you are good to go. Load it back to project and they are not snappy anymore! 

More Fun with Randomized Plug-in and Curtain Panel

Continue to do more studies with the dp Stuff Randomizer. This time I add a little twist to the curtain panel family. Pretty much using the same principle from the last example with nested family within the curtain panel and have an integer parameter driving the nested family types, I have added a rotation parameter using one of my tricks to create the nested family. Again, let the plug-in do the rest and see the result...

I overlooked one thing from my last experiment using this plug-in. As it turns out, it can perform this randomization with more than one set of parameter simultaneously. I also notice one strange thing the Randomizer does to the "Rotation" parameter. Since I have the minimum angle and maximum angle set to 0 and 360 respectively, all the "angle rotation" parameter from the panels should stay within the range. It, however, sets the angle to 4 digits value to many of the panels.

Applying the same panel to the Slope Glazing system (roof version of the Curtain Wall system) and I was able to make an interesting form as ceiling.

Throw it to the cloud rendering and get a nice perspective view for a group of random "ceiling" panels

I didn't stop there. I went on and used the same concept to come up with a "pattern" out of it. I create 4 different shapes of nested families and nest them to the curtain panel.

Click "Randomize" again...

Coincidentally, the result of this "pattern" reminds me of a famous monogram pattern from Louis Vuitton; maybe this could open up some good use for further study in the future. I am interested to investigate more by using curtain pattern based panel and adaptive components along with Dynamo. After taking the tex-fab workshop last week, I see a great potential of using Dynamo in Revit. Stay tuned to see my future post about my experiment.

Randomize Color and Material in Revit

Over the past few years I have been using curtain wall system for many different things beside storefront and curtain wall, and yet there is an easy way to mimic a design with a random pattern. Since the introduction with reporting parameters, I was able to build in some of the intelligence in the curtain panel. I have come across an plug-in called Randomizer from dp Stuff for some time and really didn't have the opportunity to investigate more in depth until recently. I thought I would take a stab and see how this plug-in can do for me.

According to the description from the site:
"The way it (the Randomizer) works – it lets you locate the instance parameter that you want to randomize among the family instances in your document by selecting the Category, then Family and then Type of your objects." In other words, it will generate a numerical value in the instance parameter for you without doing this manually.

What I am trying to do is to use the plug-in to randomize the color (hint: material) in the curtain panel to create random/mosaic pattern. Since we are talking about a material, not a number, it probably won't work with the plug-in!? I, however, have another challenge to overcome. In the component family environment, Revit won't allow you to formulate the material parameter. All you can do is to set the material as a parameter; in the formula field, you won't be able to input formula like you can for other type of parameter (e.g. Length). I recall a trick from Alfredo Medina that you can parametrize a material with conditional statement using nested family. So, I ended up rigging up a curtain panel family with a setup that looks like this:

Here's the run down of the setup. I have a nested family with 4 types (each type assigned different colors) inside the curtain panel. In the curtain panel family, set up the nested family with a Generic Model type as instance parameter.

I set up an integer parameter called "Driver" (instance parameter). Use the "Driver" parameter as part of conditional statement. The integer is associated with a specific Generic Model type parameter (color):

1 = Green
2 = Yellow
3 = Red
4 = Blue

Now, I have an numerical value (integer) that the randomizer plug-in would recognize in order to run a random integer (material) in the project.

I start off running this plug-in on a curtain wall with grid divided by 60"x60". Select the "Driver" instance parameter; from the value range, I set my minimum value to 1 and my maximum value to 4, which it will randomly choose the color among the 4 types that I assign. Click the Randomize button and let the plug-in do the rest. A nice feature of the Randomizer is I could keep hitting the button and the plug-in will continue to run.

Next, I double up the grid number with the size of 30"x30".

I also have a parameter "Thickness", throw in to the mix with the Randomizer and it gets more interesting...
Note: I set the material with transparency of 20% as the panels appear to be somewhat opaque.

One thing that I wish for this plug-in to work better is to be able to randomize two sets of instance parameters simultaneously. As of now, I have to run the instance parameter one after another one, it will do just fine.

Double up the grid again to 15"x15" at last, this time Revit takes much longer to generate the results.

This has been a great experiment for me to explore this Randomizer to a different use in design without using the more advanced plug-in like Dynamo. On the other hand, I am sure there are other ways to do this using other plug-in.
Next week I will attend the tex-fab workshop up in Austin, Texas to learn more about Dynamo, we will see what I'll be able to get out from this event.

If you are interested in reverse engineer this curtain panel family, you can download it from the link below:

Randomized Panel rfa

Curtain Wall and Engraving - Part 2

Continue on the study from my earlier post, I wanted to see the possibility of using this trick on other curtain wall panels. My good friend Kelvin Tam from Revit Swat also used this trick to create a goodbye wall from his farewell post to his firm.
At my office, we use many different architectural corrugated panels as design elements in our design. Modeling in Revit seems to be a bit of challenge. Since the panel can be as thick as 4" sometimes 6" at one point, using basic wall to represent the idea sometimes just doesn't cut it. Therefore, I came up with the idea using curtain wall to model as corrugated panel, which looks something like this:



Corrugated panel modeled as curtain wall

So, the idea of using a solid cutting out the curtain panel has become another layer of challenge. Inspired by Kelvin's post, I wanted to try for myself to use other languages in the model text and use them for cutting. From his tips, using Google Translate is probably the easiest way to get all the text I need to test it. In my case, I use the word "Welcome" from different languages.

 

All I need to do is copy and paste from Google translate to the instance parameter from my family...

 

 

Google translate offers over 70 different languages, I was very impressed by how easy it is to convert one language to another; Revit seems to take it pretty well and display it as model text.

However, once I used the model text on the corrugated panel, I started to see some unstable behavior. Since the corrugated panel is made up with nothing but curtain mullion, in order to let the solid to cut out the "panel", I had to make multiple cuts on the panel. In some case, I was able to make a clean cut to the entire panel, like this:

 

 

Other times, it is not as I expected, I get warnings like this for a few times on some words/characters:

 

 

It left me with some unlikeable result:

 

 

This also happened to the word "welcome" in Russian:

 

 

 

 

 

In conclusion, I think using a combination of this trick with Google translate worked out pretty well to my satisfaction. At the end, I was able to get different languages on a plain curtain panel.