Saturday, August 18, 2018

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY

I'm back from the BiLT conference in St Louis. Now staying in Florida with my daughter, & I've just spent three solid days working on the Bank of England model.  It feels good to get back in the saddle after a longish pause.  I decided to start with the windows of the court room.




Problem is that the Bank of England model is in Revit 2017 and I already upgraded my classical columns collection to 2018 for the BiLT NA lab.  Couldn't face upgrading a whole bunch of linked models in C4R just now.  Might eat up most of the time I wanted to spend modelling.



Sometimes adversity can have positive results. It sounds bizarre but I now have a workflow that converts classical columns from Revit 2018 back to 2017, via 2016 !!! It also reduces nesting and eliminates the planting hack.  Here's how.


Basically I assemble the column I need, using my 2018 collection. This will have at least 3 levels of nesting, two of them planting families (for SCALING).  Export this to 3d cad in SAT format. Now that it's no longer native Revit geometry, you can bring it into a family created with an earlier version of Revit. 2016 is good because it comes in as an explodable object. At this point you can upgrade to 2017. The exploded "free form" geometry will take a material parameter.




I used this method six times to create columns and pilasters to order. There aren't many circumstances where I would use this method to "fake" backward compatibility, but complex decorative elements that need to be scaled up or down (eg Classical Columns) ... Works a treat!


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