CANDOVER MENTALITY

Just in case it's too obscure, the title is a play on "can do" a typically American mindset. Used to be British in Blomfield's day but we seem to have lost it during my lifetime, or maybe it started in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-18)  For me it represents an attitude towards Revit and BIM generally. During my 22 years with GAJ in Dubai I have insisted on using these tools and processes for my own purposes, exemplified by the slogans "BIM pencil" and "the Way We Build"

Preston Candover is a small village a little to the south of Basingstoke, on the west side. Don't seem to be any buses going that way so I'll have to look for another way of getting there.

There is a small redundant church at the south end of the village, replaced by Blomfield's design close to a three-way junction. I already did a basic massing model so it's time for some upgrades. First I added tracery to a couple of windows. Then I went inside.

 

The nave trusses have an unusual design. The chancel ceiling is different. Pews and an altar plus aisle arches gave me enough for a compelling image. Good enough for now anyway. Note the face-brick interior, in contrast to the flint of the exterior. (with brick dressings)

Next came the assembly views which will feature on the sheet.

 

Time to capture site context data using Forma. I did a bit better with my process this time, but still forgot to do my initial Revit save outside Onedrive. Once again, I deleted the subdivisions to reduce the processor load, but I restored the roads as a separate subdivision, not in overlapping lengths as they come out from Forma, but as one continuous boundary.  Also adjusted the material shading colour. Didn’t affect the realistic view thankfully.  I always used to be jealous of Sketchup’s texture mapping although it doesn’t fit well with the BIM paradigm. Just a paint on effect rather than a rigorous “database” of materials with other properties.  This changed with the arrival of the realistic view and now I enjoy the simplicity with which Revit can keep the shaded, realistic and hidden line modes available in parallel. Two clicks to choose which you prefer for any given view.

 

So I linked yet another Revit file into my main map, put it on a unique workset for memory management, and created a camera view looking down the slope, across the valley to the churchyard starting to rise up the opposite side. Trees to follow.

All these views are being added to a sheet for the church as I did before for West Woodhay, and Fratton. The interior view on the sheet is different from the earlier one of course, which was captured from Family Editor while I worked on the modelling of the church itself. To place a view on a sheet, I have to have a camera placed directly in the project environment. Probably I should also have a view looking towards the church from the street. Maybe on the next pass. I’m inclined to move on to one more of Blomfield’s churches now add the site context and place views on a sheet.

 

 

FRATTONISING WITH CONTEXT

 

Second attempt to bring in Site Context via Autodesk Forma, an online service that is part of the AEC collection.  I’ve been using this sporadically for a couple of years now and it’s a very promising workflow compared to anything I used before.  The West Woodhay church was a very rural church with rolling hills, so full 3d Topo was a mush. Here I am starting to regret using the same approach. A flat ground base might have worked better from a memory management point of view.

 

It's a low-lying urban site, about 10m above sea level in the middle of Portsea Island which is more of a peninsular, and almost completely absorbed by the urban fabric of Portsmouth now. The local area is Fratton, or Fratton Road. So I’m calling this church St Mary,Fratton and giving it the Code PP51E, The toposolids that come in from Forma have a transparent top layer which is subdivided into roads and plots etc based on open-source mapping data. The base layer uses a material that has a texture map that shows up in realistic views. Basically the aerial photo data you get in google earth or similar.

Sadly, the default material for this layer shows up as dark brown in a shaded view. I don’t know why Autodesk took this decision, it dates back to the default topo-surface material years ago, and I have never liked it.  It just makes everything so dismal and lacking in contrast/clarity. 

 

I thought I had bought a pretty serious laptop for the “retirement” phase of my digital life, but 64gb is struggling to deal with this linked Revit file. Eventually I was able to open it up and change the material to a medium olive green which I find lighter on the eyes.  The buildings and trees don’t have a material parameter; they are just Generic Model “stuff” which defaults to battleship grey. Once again pretty dismal. I have resorted. to Visibility Graphics, which is view specific and chosen a lighter grey. It’s a start.

The red lines are major roads, orange is a new road for the car-centric age. Brown is the railway line with circles representing a stations. It’s actually a chain line although it’s difficult to tell at this scale.  You can clearly see the relationship to the dockyards in the final image.

 

This was a heavy day. Working with the Forma export, context model for the Fratton church. It was extremely sluggish and I couldn’t quite fathom why. I just assumed it was to do with the urban location and I just had to tough it out until I got something usable.

I kind of got there by sleepy time, adding a floor for the churchyard, placing some trees and the church itself. You get a sense of streets and streets of terrace housing (urban Portsmouth) with the docks of the naval yard in the distance. Sadly my Internet connection would not load it into the cloud so I put it in a local folder.

Stupidly I chose a folder that syncs to Onedrive so it was constantly trying to sync in the background. Pain helps us learn. 

 

APPROACHING THE PERPENDICULAR

 St Mary, Fratton (Portsmouth) the largest of Blomfield’s churches in my study area. I’m continuing the process of adding indicative tracery where appropriate to better convey the “feel” of the design. It’s my first attempt at Perpendicular style tracery. When I was learning about Gothic architecture as a teenager at Barnsley Grammar School, there were three main periods (I think) Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular.  The names and analysis may have been updated (I don’t really know, not being up to date with the academic world) but I find those three labels a useful starting point for making sense of the world of Gothic and Gothic Revival.

 

Blomfield mostly used Early English on his small to medium sized churches, lots of lancet windows, narrow slots with a pointed top where tracery is not even necessary. Some wider window stray into the Decorated zone with more flowing shapes and floral references carved into the stone. Perpendicular takes a more rectilinear approach with decorative flourishes concentrated in the upper portion of a window. I’m still using short front-to-back sweeps here to guard against distortion and/or error messages should the width and height parameter of the family change.

The trick is to establish the primary grid first, then edit this to suggest the non-rectangular portions of the design. I usually have a second, shorter sweep to maintain the linearity of the grid when add the curved embellishments. This is a gross simplification of course, the actual stonework is a highly three-dimensional, sculpted set of forms.  It would be interesting to do a more detailed study of this, as I started to do a year or so ago, but not within the massing models of these churches which are intended to be viewed within the context of their settings (churchyard, village, town, landscape)

 

I am considering the merits of adding a splayed edge to these windows. One way to do this is to create a void sweep with a triangular profile whose path uses the same geometry constraints as the main void extrusion which defines the window in the first place. It would be possible to use a “pick edge” approach to defining the path, but this is inherently risky because the void sweep is actually destroying that edge by design. Ignore these technicalities if you don’t use Revit. Let’s just say that I’m trying to find low-resolution versions of the forms that make up a church in order to better understand the geometry and overall form.

 

Next come Assembly Views, a quick way of setting up a sheet for a Revit family like this. I already have a view template from previous churches withing the master file, so it’s very fast to set up four elevations and a 3d view (parallel/orthographic)  These views illustrate the logic of taking a broad-brush approach. The finer detail of the tracery is already lost in an impressionistic blob of black lines. Further elaboration would be pointless.

 

 

The 3d view does have a higher resolution and begins to show the limitations of the simplified forms if you zoom in close with a critical eye. But that’s not the intention of this work and it’s always important in the sphere of digital models and BIM to assess the appropriate level of information/detail for the purpose at hand. Are you adding value commensurate with the extra effort involved for everyone concerned, and the load upon the digital infrastructure (computer memory etc)

This work is being done in a Revit file stretched far beyond the size limits recommended for the software. There are more than 400 individual churches within the study area. I’m already struggling to bring in site information via Autodesk Forma.  Let’s keep it simple folks.

 

CHURCH IN SITE (LAND AHOY)

 Sneak peek. I've been labouring away with Forma. It's been a while and saving was awfully slow. My Internet, the ridiculous extent of the Hampshire map (for a Revit file)  I soon realised that I needed to package the Forma data into a separate Revit file then link it into the map. I was creating site context for St Laurence Woodhay (by Blomfield) Turns out that there are rolling hills and valleys. Definitely a new insight.

I changed the colour of the road subdivision, added a few floor slabs to represent the churchyard, village plots, a lake. Set up some assembly views of the church. Makes for a fun sheet with room for a couple of photographs. Not finished yet. I want to populate the churchyard for example. Put some indicative houses in the village. Make a massing model for Inigo Jones' manor house.  But it's coming along.

 

Some process shots. In Forma you can capture a square from anywhere in earth (maybe not the poles) and choose from various sources of data. There’s enough free stuff on the list to satisfy me. Topo, roads, boundaries … also buildings and trees, but in this case that doesn’t amount to much. The great thin is the texture mapping. You have to be in a realistic view in Revit for this to show up, but I actually find the ability to flip back and forth between the two really useful.

I haven’t yet mastered getting it to come in the right place automatically. Probably not a big deal since I’m putting it in a wrapper, so it makes sense to place the forma data at the origin in that linked Revit file. The 3d toposolid with contours totally transformed my understanding of the site context. It’s a series of ridge-&-furrow-like folds running diagonally across the site with small streams that flow eventually into the Kennet and thence the Thames.

 

The texture maps clearly show areas of woodland and agricultural fields. It helps to select the strips of topo that represent roads and change their colour. I chose a very pale grey.  West Woodhay Park has one of the streams crossing the property. By damming this at the road has created a “bell-head” lake which enhances the view from the house which is quite naturally built on high ground and along the countours, facing downhill.

I placed the linked file in its own workset, named with the same code as the church. This will ease the burden of selective opening when I add more and more location studies.

 

So the next thing was to develop the churchyard. A coupe of floor slab objects, one flatter than the other representing the churchyard itself and the adjacent Memorial Garden. I still need to add the central pavilion in the garden, plus some shrubs lining the paths perhaps. A family to represent graves with a choice of headstone will be universally useful going forward so I should have a go at that soon. Probably do a simple one and improve it iteratively.  The (grey) trees that came in from forma are low-poly objects. Possible to change the colour in visibility graphics. Enscape uses a similar type of geometry in it’s tree families and I have some of these saved in a file, so I used one of these and created different sizes (easy to do with a double-nested planting family) Using a translucent green material works quite well but with the down-side of not casting shadows.