Shades of Grey

GOLF IN THE GULF

2012-01-22T19:35:00.002+04:00

I set out this weekend to make my first screen capture video. Please don't laugh, I will get better with practice. I decided to make a fairly simple parametric mass family such as we might use in early design development, and the building that sprang to mind is one that my good friend (and boss) Brian Johnson designed early in his career, here in Dubai.

The Club House at Emirates Golf Course is designed as a cluster of tents, symbolising the Majlis course which was seen as something of a miracle at the time, being an all grass, championship golf course in the middle of the desert. Since then a second 18 hole course has been added, and the desert has given way to a dense forest of office & residential towers, not to mention several hotels.
I'm pretty sure this was a hand-drawn project, probably with much fewer drawings than the enormous sheet sets we churn out these days. How different the world is just 25 years later. It would be interesting to take this simulation of early design development a little further using the Emirates Club House as a case study.

On a completely different topic, I talked to a contractor last week who was complaining about having to take Architects 2d CAD plans and convert them into BIM models in order to anticipate coordination problems on site. I've had similar stories from Engineers who have been the lone Revit pioneers in a design team. Needless to say we are GAJ have been struggling with the need dumb down our Revit models into flat DWG for clients, engineers and contractors. Let's hope the Arab Spring of Revit is approaching.

So back to the videos. It comes in 3 parts, and the links are here.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

You can also download a project with the massing family arrayed in 3 different configurations here.

Tent Mass

THE OTHER SIDE OF ME

2012-01-19T20:43:00.001+04:00

You may have noticed it says "Blues Musician" at the end of the "about me" stuff under my photo.

Well I finally got around to making a music video & posting it to You Tube. I'm usually the last person on the planet to latch on to new technologies, so don't get too surprised.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgABjqiqtQk&context=C339cbccADOEgsToPDskJA_Kjd5NrM1UWAqvhZKpt4

Now that I've started there will be more ... and I promise to start doing Revit videos too ... maybe even this weekend.

Here's a pic from what will probably be my next music upload. Just solo stuff at the moment, but maybe I'll manage to capture my small band too.

Heading for home now (honest)

UP THE GARDEN PATH

2012-01-15T21:14:00.001+04:00

One of my little hobbies is to plug away in areas where Revit is notoriously weak, in the belief that things are not always as bad as they seem. For example my attempts to create better families for toilets & washbasins. Stairs and railings are also obvious targets. Another common complaint is the lack of tools for creating roads and footpaths. There is a 3rd party plug-in that you can buy (Eagle Point). I haven't had a chance to try it out but Aaron Maller has done some very interesting work with it. malleristic revitation

My challenge for last weekend was to try to squeeze some extra performance from out-of-the-box tools like ramps, floors & railings. Revit ramps are a mixed blessing. They rarely display as you would like them to in plan views, which I find very puzzling. Like stairs they are designed to go from level to level using preset rules, which makes them a bit cumbersome to use as footpaths. But let's try.

Imagine a drop-off point on a slope. The pavement around the edge needs a kerb and a set of regularly spaced bollards. The first point to note is that risers are divisions between sections of sloping ramp and flat landing. To go from straight ramp to curved ramp you can omit the riser or place two risers in the same place. Oddly enough the second option works better.

The fill pattern on a curved ramp will adapt to the curve. A square grid becomes a radial pattern for example. Also the railings will follow the slope of the curve very nicely.

But if you use a floor with a slope arrow, the grid remains square & the railings won't quite match the slope. You can see this clearly at the junction between floor & kerb. The kerb is a simple rail, and the bollards a series of balusters. You can force the slope arrow to follow a curve using the pick option, but it makes no difference, the floor will remain flat, and the bollards will float above it in the middle even though they touch at both ends.

Also take care how you draw the railing. The slope is determined by the start and end points of each segment. In this case, rotating the sketch by 90 degrees creates a very different result.

The shortcomings of the ramp tool are well known. You need to do a lot of drafting to get the appearance you want in a plan view, and in section it's probably worse. There is no "edit structure" to add a finishes build-up and no "join geometry" to clean up the junction with the clever railing you invented to emulate a curved parapet wall.

It's great that they have the intelligence to respond to maximum slope settings and automatically prompt you into placing landings at the stipulated intervals. Could be a great tool with a little extra functionality. But stairs & ramps both suffer from one of their common strengths. They are defined in relation to levels. That's fantastic most of the time, but if you want to use them as landscape objects it becomes an annoying restriction.

So for a road flyover that has varying curves & gradients I choose ... in-place modelling, yet again & that wonderful invention that we got so excited about in the days before conceptual massing THE SWEPT BLEND. Make a profile for your bridge cross-section. Use it in a series of swept blends and tweak the curves and the levels of each profile to your hearts content. Not very hard to create graceful bridge forms with a bit of practice.

Almost looks like Dubai. Notice the W-beam crash barrier. Make yourself custom railing profile & baluster post families, define yourself a new railing type and away you go.

The quick and dirty solution for roads and footpaths is the topography subregion. No kerbs of course, but they will follow the terrain and they are quick to make. Also nice for golf courses, cricket pitches, flower beds ... Pads are better for water of course because liquids tend lie flat.

At this point I was having so much fun I got a bit carried away and tried to make an adaptive family for a fence that would curve and swoop, twist and wind ... imagine the possibilities.

Step one was a very simple mass family. Just a vertical line with the "always vertical" parameter checked (family category & parameters) Load this in to another mass family and host a bunch of them on adaptive points. I figured out how to lock them in place so they moved up and down as a unit. Fantastic. Select the lines, create form, divide surface. Problem solved. (not)

Worked fine in the family environment, but that is not always a good indicator. Soon as I loaded it into a project it broke. Almost broke my heart. But then I had another thought ... what about modelling in place ?

So I followed the same strategy but this time all the adjustments are done by editing the family, so no opportunity to break. I was so chuffed. The posts and rails are curtain panels by pattern of course, based on the rectangular template.

One day I will get round to exploring a range of different fence styles by setting up different panels, but for now I will quickly skip forward to my last brainwave of a rather productive weekend: image processing without rendering. Not the answer to every situation, but could be a useful timesaver, and there is surely potential for batch exporting plus some automation within the image editor. Could become a veritable production line & all thanks to "realistic" views.

I'm not a big fan of the realistic view. Tends to look garish. Somehow the material settings that work well for rendering are often too strident when viewed in "realistic". But that's exactly where a bit of image processing can help out. Combine a realistic with a shaded or hidden line, use an overlay setting, some transparency and/or an artistic filter. Instant touchy-feely ... what more could you want ?

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

2012-01-12T18:48:00.005+04:00

So last weekend I was playing on the stairs again. This time I wanted to extend my use of the system stair tool. No fancy conceptual massing tricks allowed. So the obvious place to start was the spiral stair that I did a couple of posts back. It turned out that I could create something very similar. Slightly less control over the shape of tread, but much easier to place 2 balusters per tread, which is more realistic in terms of safety, regulations etc.

The support brackets are of course modelled as railings by creating a customised baluster family. The stair therefore has two railings, one set to two balusters per tread, the other to one. I will return to my adaptive stair shortly and demonstrate its ability to offer much more variety in tread design. In the system tool you only have a single riser line to define the shape of the tread, but in my adaptive family you can basically model any shape of tread you like.

So the next little exercise was to explore different tread shapes using the system stair tool. I made an elliptical stair and gave it treads with an "S curve". This is quite straighforward but you need to set your geometry out carefully. I drafted it first using detail lines, then traced over with the pick option. The second stair is even simpler to make, but an interesting exercise all the same. The bottom few risers are splayed, and the boundary on one side has to step and splay.

This made me think of Michelangelo's famous stair in the lobby to the Laurentian library. I took this step by step (to coin a phrase) starting with a straight flight and progressively modifying it. This is often a good approach so that when you inevitably receive the "can't make monolithic stair" message, you can go back to the previous stage and try again.

Eventually I was able to model something fairly convincing and then I just had to quickly rough out the tall square room that surrounds it. I will do another post on this once I have developed it further. Had fun with the balustrade too, all done with the normal railings tool, 2 different custom balusters, (one set to be a post at beginnings and ends) and one custom handrail profile (the bottom one is rectangular)

Just to polish off the weekend I decided to try making an ampitheatre. Looking through my archive I came across the Theatre of Marcellus, also in Rome. This turned into a fascinating exercise in stairs and radial arrays. I simplified the geometry a bit so as to make the most of the array tool. Worked like a treat. I love the way that arrays in Revit remain "alive" so you can adjust your design as it develops.

There are 4 or 5 different radial arrays to make up the seating and the access stairs that fit between the wedges. For each one you keep adjusting the radius and the number of elements. Also by tabbing in to a single element and editing that group, you can adjust the instance properties of that stair, (where it starts & finishes, desired number of risers) This was a very powerful way for me to explore the way a Roman theatre works.

Again the surrounding structure is a possible future post, but you can get a glimpse of the way this is also largely composed of a series of live radial arrays that allow you to adjust the spacing and size of archways, column arrays etc until you are happy with the proportions and relationships. Parametric modelling at its best and all very basic Revit stuff that's been hardwired into the programme since forever.

Lest you think I am giving the stair tool to easy a ride let me finish with some grumbles. We all know that monolithic stairs don't work properly. They don't join to floor slabs (which is an absolute paint in the posterior) and if you want curved risers, be careful not to curve too far or they will start to cut into each other. As for sketch mode. It is very clever, but sometimes it just does its own thing, especially when you have a blue "run" in there. Intermediate risers don't need to be cleaned up, which is a time saver, but make sure you clean up all the corners.

OUR LADY UP THE HILL

2012-01-08T18:04:00.003+04:00

This is the second of (probably) several posts on Le Corbusier's famoul pilgrimage chapel on the hill overlooking the village of Ronchamp. As source material I had quite a lot of photographs and several drawings, in jpeg format. These can be dragged into Revit and scaled up to life size. I estimated the size based on Google Earth & started tracing over a plan.

The curved walls are generally irregular and asymmetrical, For simplicity of construction I have compromised a little, but to maintain the feeling broken them down into short lengths with different radii. I'm using real walls, not extrusions, because eventually I want to cut sections and see the thickness of the roughcast plaster. The South Wall is an exception. This tapers and curves, rising to a sharp point at the South East corner so the wall system tool is not an option. I used in-place massing, starting with a blend, then adjusting with push-pull.

The west wall is curved in plan with an irreglar curve along its top edge. Edit profile won't work on curved walls, so I made a wall hosted family with a void cut, using a spline for the lower edge, and adjusting it by trial & error. The same method was used on the east wall.

I made the chapel walls symmetrical about an axis so that the half-domes could be in-place revolves, picking the top edge of the wall to make the profile. This is not quite accurate. The tops of the domes seem to be slightly flattened. But I think its an acceptable trade-off.

Not everyone realises that this building is based on a regular grid. Actually Corb nearly always used a rational grid. I set the grids up and used them as reference planes for a series of splines within an in-place mass. I read a post last week where someone wanted to abolish in-place families. I didn't find much use for them when I first started with Revit, but on a project like this they are indispensible. Select the splines and hit "create" to make a surface.

One of the splines is placed on a reference plane (not a grid). This can be rotated to fine-tune the angle. The whole surface can be adjusted while in edit mode by tab-selecting the splines one by one and adjusting the control points. I set up several perspective views to match photographs & just kept tweaking until it looked OK.

There is a void cut to form to remove the excess around the North-West corner. I tried to use roof-by-face to create an element with thickness, but it refused. This is unfortunate because I was hoping to attach some of the walls to the roof. Strangely enough, wall-by-face worked, so the roof is actually a wall as far as Revit is concerned.

At this point I had a light-bulb moment. I don't know why it's taken so long to think of this. For over 6 years I have been hiding and unhiding section boxes in the view, simply because I find the solid lines annoying and confusing. My light bulb said, go to object styles and make them grey dash. No longer obtrusive and annoying. This is going into my standard template. The other penny that dropped was to do with the roof construction. The more I looked at my reference material and thought about the structural properties of this roof, the more I realised it must be a hollow double skin construction with vertical ribs along the lines of my splines.

The ribs must line up with the concrete columns. There are photos taken during construction which show the column and beam arrangement for the south wall. The infill is semi-coursed stonework salvaged from a previous building. I made the columns as a loadable family with parameters to adjust the base width either side of the point of support.

I realised now that my first attempt at the south wall was inaccurate, so I rebuilt it, this time as a series of vertical profiles hosted on the faces of the columns. I gave them a 50mm offset to allow for the thick roughcast plaster finish and that worked fine. By setting the wall to ghost surfaces in a view you can see the relationship between concrete framing and masonry infill.

Creating the tapering voids for the windows is not so easy. They are blends of course, but because the wall itself is tapering they tend to get distorted out of square. I tried to solve this by drawing on the plane of the wall, but the wall is not a flat plane, so you have to create reference planes that approximates the interior & exterior surfaces of the wall. This worked fairly well, but I need to go back and set it up more carefully when I have more time.

The North Wall was much easier. I modified one of my simple window families so that I could control width & height by instance. (every window is different, so no point in creating types) Then I set up an image and a revit view side by side on my screen and eyeballed the whole thing. Good enough for first pass.

By this stage I had become interested in the site context and created a toposurface around the building. This was all based on guesswork, but later, (after I discovered the google earth trick) I created topography for the hill and surroundings. I was also adding more and more detail. The floor inside actually follows the slope of the site, then steps up to create a low platform for the altar.

As an illustration of the way that making a BIM model leads to a deeper understanding of a building, check out the stair on the North Wall that leads up past a green door to a red door. 2 storeys up. There is a cutaway perspective that appears in many text books, copied repeatedly by different artists including the redoubtable Francis Ching (No offence, I love his work). Because of the cut plane, only the lower half of the staircase is showing. Nobody seems to have noticed over all the years that this drawing has been copied that the stair is actually going in the wrong direction !

Lots of fascinating details in this building. The rainwater spout that looks like a bull's horns in section and discharges into a sculptural feature with a storage tank below. The play between paired forms either side of the East Wall. Two altars, two crucifixes, two choir balconies, two pulpits. This creates two churches - one indoor & one outdoor. It also gives Corb the perfect chance to play his little games with the relationships between the pairs.
I'm not 100% sure of this but I think there is a bridge at first floor level in the N.E. corner so you can walk throught the green door, assemble in the upstairs room, then across the bridge to the indoor choir & through another door to the external choir.

These internal subtleties were modelled during my second weekend on Ronchamp, and in-between I had been exploring Gaudi and discovered the topography trick. So once again I grabbed the terrain using the plug-in for AutoCAD, linked this mesh into Revit and created a toposurface. Then I save an image of the same area, also from Google Earth.

The trick now is to crop the image very carefully so that the corners match the rectangle of the toposurface. You also need to know the size of the rectangle. From there it's fairly easy to make a material which scales up the image and maps it onto the terrain. Probably you will have to mirror the image (no idea why). You may also have to adjust the offset values for the image (materials /appearance /click on image / transforms)

Someone has asked me to do a video of this process, and I would love to, but I haven't yet ventured into that territory. Something for the future.

Didn't take me long to adjust the topography I had previously made by guesswork so it fits on top of my new hill like a little hat. New insights almost immediately. Pathways through the trees that surely must be pilgrimage routes. A visual connection between the church in the village below and the chapel up on the hill.

If Yves Gravelin is reading this he might care to comment on some of my guesses. He joined the blog not long ago, and happens to live within driving distance of Ronchamp. He has a cool website featuring a Revit model of a theatre designed by Ledoux. Nice work Yves ! http://theatreledouxbesancon.blogspot.com/

BASIN STREET BLUES

2012-01-04T20:54:00.000+04:00

I've been struggling with the need for better sanitary ware families for some years now. Out of the box you basically get some stuff made 7 or 8 years ago that illustrates how families could be made. I wouldn't want to use them in a set of construction drawings. The graphics in plan or elevation just aren't crisp enough, and there's no way I would render them for a client presentation.

In fairness to Autodesk, they are supplying the toolkit, not the building materials. These families should be coming from the companies that make the sanitary ware. This is slowly starting to happen, but 9 times out of 10 you will end up making it yourself. I use masking regions and symbolic lines for orthographic views, (often DWG files downloaded from manufacturer sites). Solid geometry is set to be only visible in 3d views.

Making plausible 3d geometry is not easy, but it can be done. About 3 years ago I made a passable version of the Ideal Standard "Tiffany" range using old fashioned revit extrusions & sweeps. With a bit of imagination this can be made to work for many fittings.

Another approach is to model in a different application and import the results into a Revit family as a 3d DWG or SAT file . A bit of careful naming with your CAD layers under Object Styles/Imports in Families can give you control over the materials from within the project. I flirted briefly with 123D (see previous post) but haven't found time yet to pursue this further.

Some manufacturers supply 3d CAD files that you can import into families. I spent a week or so last year making a whole bunch of families using downloads from Duravit and Hansgrohe . One day I will write this up as a separate post.

More recently I've been using the conceptual massing tools to generate forms. The trick is to draw a closed loop in a mass family and use this as a profile to generate forms.

Load your profile into another mass family or adaptive component and paste multiple copies onto a series of levels.

Now you can flex the profiles using parameters you built in to them. (width, length, radius etc) Select them all and "create form". Plumbing fixtures tend to be re-entrant forms. You can't make these directly, but I learnt a little trick during my pumpkin experiments.

After the form is made, you can move the top profile down. Just go into an elevation view and move the level it's hosted on.

This is a counter-top basin. I made it previously using blends and rounding off the rim with a void sweep but it lacked the subtle curves of this version.

This first exploration gave me the insights I needed to plan a semi-recessed basin. The profile makes use of simple formulae to keep the depth parameters proportional to the width.

This time I controlled the heights of the profiles by giving each of them a different offset parameter (H1, H2 etc) Once again the trick is to arrange your profiles in a simple sequence and adjust them later to form a bowl. Tab-select each profile to adjust its size and position. With a bit of careful tweaking I achieved something close to what I wanted.

If you dissolve the form and remake it you get something totally different. This illustrates the basic principle of making re-entrant forms with Revit conceptual massing profiles. start with a convex form, then adjust the profile heights AFTER using the create form button

To make the top of the basin flatter, I adjusted the profile slightly, and added another 2 instances. Had to reset the heights before hitting "Create Form" then more careful tweaking in a side elevation view to sculpt the form.

A simple void extrusion cuts away the back. Then it's ready to receive a chrome tap and waste from my accessories library. It renders very nicely, but now for the bad news. In Revit 2012, adaptive components can be lots of things, but not plumbing fixtures. Plumbing fixtures (eg the tap) can be nested inside them. but they cannot be nested inside normal families. Also you can't use symbolic lines or masking regions in an adaptive component.

I'm not sure what's preventing this. Maybe there is a serious software problem, or perhaps Autodesk are just being cautious, waiting for processing power to catch up before allowing conceptual massing tools to spread through into all the family types. I could export my form to CAD and re-import it into a plumbing family, but that's rather a sad work-around.

Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to fiddle with this stuff in my spare time and we could just download high quality content from the manufacturers. I'm talking about families that look good in high-quality interior design visuals, and in construction drawings at 1:100 or 1:20.

ADAPTIVE SPIRAL STAIRS

2012-01-02T12:54:00.000+04:00

I was looking through Zach Kron's parametric patterns series, which is still available on his Buildz website, and well worth a look if you missed it. The INCREMENT SPIRAL caught my eye and I started wondering "how would I convert this into a fully parametric spiral stair"

I took the family that Zach created: just a spiral line, with parameters for height, radius, rotation angle. (You can vary the top and bottom radius separately to make a cone, but I just wanted a cylinder.) The goal was to make a spiral surface, divide it, then populate it with curtain panel families that emulate stair treads. The divided surface gives you a neat way to vary the number of vertical divisions.

My first attempt at a surface turned out to be a DNA style double helix. Then I realised I could get what I wanted using the spiral plus a simple vertical line. The heights of both are linked to the same parameter. I divided the surface and created a parameter called "no of risers"

Tried out a curtain pattern family with a cylinder on one edge. Changed the panel rotation angle to get this edge in the right place. Then replaced the cylinder with a triangle. The challenge now was to get this to sit up into the horizontal plane.

Curtain pattern families are designed to lie in the plane of a curved or twisted surface. I needed to push one corner of my tread up, so I hosted a point on a point, gave it an offset value.and linked this to a parameter called "riser height". Withing the stair family, this can be tied to a formula that divides the total height by the number of risers.

So far so good and I was getting excited. But if you look carefully they're not quite level. I spent some time working out trigonometric formulae, which was fun, but in the end I decided that there had to be a better way. I had a nice family with lots of instance parameters so I could copy it around and explore lots of different sizes and shapes. But the fact remains that each stair is made out of a series of identical components.

So why was I fighting against the curtain panel geometry all the time trying to keep all the bits aligned to horizontal and vertical when I flex the family and the pitch of the spiral changes ?

Why not make the whole tread assembly as a nested component and simply align it with the vertical line ? (ie the post in the centre of the stair) So I went back to an old-fashioned generic model template and made lots of extrusions. I had to have parameter that I could link back to the host family (riser height, radius, angle etc) But at least now it was much easier to offset the baluster in from the edge of the tread and to be confident that everything would stay in the horizontal and vertical plane.

This family was then nested into a 3 pick adaptive component. Reporting parameters record the distance between points so as to control the riser height and radius. So when I place the adaptive component in a curtain panel family it will automatically have the right size and alighment (pick, pick, pick)

It worked a treat, and the rest was down to designing my tread assembly. Because curtain panels & adaptive components are shared families by default, I could just open the adaptive component directly from the project.

To prove that the result is truly orthogonal I set up some dummy construction details. Everything dimensions very nicely

Being shared families you can select individual treads and isolate them in a view, over-ride by instance, etc. Not sure I would use these stair families directly in a big project. Puts a bit of a load on the processor. But for exploring the geometry of a spiral stair it's great. You can play with rotation angles and radii, go past 360 degrees, change the number of risers.

Once you have the configuration you want, it's possible to make a reasonable version using the Revit stair tool. Use that in the main model, then maybe have a separate detailing file where you show the full design intent using this kind of family. Gives you a much finer level of control than the system family tool.

Closing with an image as usual. Rendered and shaded views combined in Photoshop. One extra little trick here. Have two layers, one sharp and one blurred, then use a soft mask to fade from sharp in the midldle to blurred at the edges. Give the illusion of depth of field.

TERMINOLOGICAL ILLNESS

2011-12-29T20:05:00.000+04:00

An interesting debate has been taking place around the term "BIM model". Personally I think that Luke Johnson is closer to the truth than James Van. Both do excellent work in the Revit Blogosphere, but if you want to venture into the world of linguistics, it pays to do your homework.

I recommend "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher. It's a cracking read and full of deep insight into the slippery nature of words.

"BIM model" has caught on because "Building Information Model" is too long to use repeatedly, and "BIM" on its own is too short/ambiguous. "BIM model" makes it absolutely clear that you are talking about a thing, not a process. If you don't like it come up with a better term.

The crucial point to remember is that literal translations will always sound clumsy. (try Google Translate) For example "crucial point" translates to "cross-shaped dot" or perhaps "cross-shaped sharp thing". Neither of these sounds very clever, but should that discourage me from using a very useful phrase ?

Guy Deutscher cites the wonderful example of French for "today". Literally speaking, "aujourd'hui" expands to "on the day of this day" ("hui" is a contraction of the Latin "Hodie", itself a slurred version of Hoc Die)

I'm not sure if James has children, but if he does he probably tells them bedtime stories that begin with "once upon a time" ... which is essentially the same as saying "one-time-up-on-one-time". Pretty stupid when you dissect it, but a wonderful phrase that has enchanted countless generations of children.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that language is a wonderful, elusive, contradictory, adventure. There's no point in complaining, you may as well enjoy the ride.

WIGGLY TOPO

2011-12-28T18:26:00.004+04:00

Park Guell sits in a horseshoe shaped basin nestled into the foothills of the mountains behind Barcelona. At 148m above sea level, the main terrace has stunning views over the city and out to sea. How to get this into my Revit model ? Can I grab contours from Google Earth ?

A quick search throws up references in Revit Forum and CAD addict, two excellent sources of information. There is a plug-in for AutoCAD available as a free download on Autodesk LABS. This creates a mesh. Save to DWG, link into Revit and create topography by import instance: click, tick, done.

This is wonderful, but I want to see trees and houses, and those wonderful elevated roadways that snake around the folds of the hills, supported on random stone pillars. vaults and buttresses in trademark Gaudi style. As you can see I was successful. The challenge was to create a material from Google Earth imagery, scale it correctly, and map it onto the topography.

If you switch to realistic view in AutoCAD, you will see that the mesh already has a low-res image draped over the terrain. This is useful. I can inspect the corners carefully to decide where to crop my image. The image itself comes from Google Earth Pro which allows you to save at higher resolutions. If you only have the free version that's fine, the results will still be useable.

My aim is to create a Russian Doll effect. A site, within a site, within a site. The inner portion will be fully modelled in Revit. The next shell will be fairly high resolution topography and imagery. As we proceed outwards the resolution will necessarily become coarser. No problem. All I need is the impression of the city spreading out over the coastal plain with the sea shimmering out on the horizon.
My Russian dolls are linked Revit files with shared coordinates and levels. The main file, is modelled directly in Revit. There is no imagery mapped onto the topography here. Instead I have subregions with materials for grass, footpaths, etc. This is topo 1.

Topo 2 is a linked Revit file with a larger rectangle of topography. I have carefully cropped an image to match the rectangle that was grabbed by the Autocad Plug-in, and set up a plan view that allows me to decide on the real-world size of this "rectangle" ... which is actually somewhat distorted as it wraps over the contours.

Next step is to create a material based on the cropped image and scale it up to life size. For some crazy reason I had to mirror all my images (rotate canvas, flip horizontal in Photoshop) It's almost as if the topography turns itself inside out during the "create from import instance" process. Also had to rotate 90 in most cases and to adjust the X & Y offsets. If you are not familiar with these features in appearance tab of the materials dialogue, now is a good time to explore. They are hidden in a secret room, accessed by clicking on the image. To choose a new image you have to click on its name. It's easy once you know how.

Be aware that the mesh is quite crude. If you are a real architect doing a real job for a real client ... better get a real survey done by a real land surveyor. But for early concept work, (or explorations into Gaudi) it's certainly much better than guess work.

I decided to record some levels and coordinates from Google Earth to check against my Revit model. This is all useful information when it comes to setting up a shared coordinates and levels system. My first attempts to creat meshes were incorrectly scaled. Need to set units in both Google Earth and AutoCAD, then check the results before moving on,

It is well known that Revit hates DWG style Real World Coordinates. You have to accept centre-to-centre imports. I am sure many of you have struggled with this. In this case the DWG files are Revit friendly if you accept the default values when creating the mesh (enter, enter = place at 0,0 with zero rotation) Vertical heights will be correct, but to locate X & Y you will need Northings and Eastings for a known feature.

In practice this meant some manual adjustment when linking Topo 1 into Topo 2 (for example) Once you have linked any 2 files together and shared coordinates, you are in business. You can now link any 2 files by shared coordinates, load and unload at your pleasure. Once again, if you are not too familiar with shared coordinates yet, get your hands dirty. Experiment and learn. It may seem hard at first, but it's wonderful, powerful stuff "once you know how".

One problem with multiple nested sites is going to be 3 sets of topography in the same place. The larger pieces are extremely crude and will obscure the more detailed modelling of the smaller ones. My solution is to create resizeable holes: voids that allow the Russian Dolls to sit inside each other. Resizeable is especially important in the middle because I want to gradually eliminate the crude Google Earth topograhy as I replace it with Revit objects. What do you call a resizeable hole in Revit topography ? Yes, it's a pad.

If you check out some of my images you will see where Topo 1 and Topo 2 are weaving in and out of each other. I am gradually reducing this effect by editing topo 1, moving individual points up and down. It's all very ad-hoc, but in the absence of highly detailed survey information ... it works for me. I ended up with 4 topo surfaces, the biggest being almost 8km wide.

Don't know if anyone else has used this method, or can suggest improvements. At the moment I am quite excited by the potential. Can't wait to put Corb's chapel on its hill overlooking the village of Ronchamp and identify the paths that pilgrims take up the hill. When is a pilgrim not a pilgrim ? (think Tourist, but then maybe tourism is the modern form of pilgrimage. Worship the sun and the sand, the wilderness, the historic creations of past architects. Restore your soul with a journey to some metaphoric Canterbury)

And so my last image is of Gaudi's hypostyle hall at dawn with shafts of light streaming in to wake the oracle. And my oracle is telling me that there are many more mysteries to be uncovered at Park Guell if I have the patience and endurance to continue to model. So far my representations are as crude as topography I grabbed from Google Earth. There are so many avenues to be explored: wrought iron railings and gates, the gatehouses, the raised roadways, how to represent the broken tile patterns ? how to model the rough stone work ?

Behind it all the deeper issue of how to abstract something highly complex into a simpler version that is managable, recognisable and useful. It's sometimes called seeing the wood from the trees and it's "what Architects do."

WIGGLY SEATS

2011-12-26T08:05:00.002+04:00

Truth be told Gaudi has always been my favourite architect. As a teenager, this was a reaction to orthodoxy, much the same as my decision a few years later to abandon architecture and become a bricklayer. But towards the end of my bricklaying period I made a pilgrimage to Barcelona and was much struck by the inherent practicality of his work. Another decade passed, and I was back at University seeking to rejoin the profession I had abandoned. The extract below is from an essay I wrote then at the age of 40.

The seats at the Guell Park are not a whimsical creation. They are a highly integrated solution to a complex practical problem, right down to the little tiled domes at the rear of the seat that keep your backside away from any vestiges of dampness lingering at the low point of the section. To model them in Revit, you need a profile. Some of you may not realise that you can drag a jpeg image into a family to use as a reference. It has no other effect. You can delete it later if you want, but it doesn't stop the profile from working. In this case it's a snap I took with a cheap analogue camera in 1979.

My first inclination was to sweep this profile along a spline as shown above, but further study showed that Gaudi's deck actually follows a very strict geometry. I have used a 3.6m grid (estimated by scaling from Google Earth) There is an underlying octagonal theme, expressed in the column capitals, which sets up a strong diagonal. The path for the sweep is easily created by dividing the diagonal into quarters and then striking semicircles that meet at the quarter points. So easy to construct with Revit's built-in drafting tools. Hard to imagine that I struggled with Revit's 2D capabilities limiting when I first made the transition from Autocad.

Just a reminder that I am using Revit as an investigatory tool here. More concerned with learning how the inner secrets of Park Guell than making a faithful replica. So I'm setting aside the difficult problem of how to represent the infinite variety of the broken tile patterns. You're going to have to accept the default blue mosaic that comes with Revit for now. The next shot is a fine illustration of what I hate about RPCs (wonderful though they are in many ways) Poor old Cynthia looks so fake and uncomfortable, unlike me as a youthful bricklayer in 1979.

I've talked about bringing jpegs into families. For a task like this I line up photos with matching camera views on a sheet. This often reveals shortcomings in the model and sometimes leads to unexpected discoveries.

Gaudi's free interpretation of a doric column has an octagonal abacus and 12 fluted shaft, with a round tiled base section. After a while I realised that the columns around the edge taper towards the top, but inside they are all straight. For the moment, mine are all straight. Also, there are some missing columns. Not sure why yet. So one day's work took me to the stage shown below. Lots of shortcomings and quick cheats in there, but Working in Revit is a bit like sculpting out of a block of stone. Rough it out first, get some crude families in there so you can start to visualise, then progressively refine and update. Keep chipping away.

Couldn't resist one of my cheeky little combination renders to finish off. Here are some clues: the walls with rounded tops are actually railings; Floor slab edges between the columns and the seats; wall hosted generic model to cut the voids out for the castellated wall top, red tiled wall sweep just below that.

RONCHY IMAGES

2011-12-18T08:18:00.006+04:00

This all started while I was looking at materials that Jason Grant posted, from a session he gave at Autodesk University with David Light. It was called Graphics that Pop and you should take a good look because there's some nice stuff in there. LINK TO GRAPHICS THAT POP

But I went off at a complete tangent while looking at Jason's file. There was a massing model in there of a few city blocks which included a church. To be honest I still struggle a bit trying to make shapes like this in the conceptual massing environment. I want to go back to old fashioned pink lines. Obviously Jason got over this long ago, so I felt challenged to try harder.

I did quite well at first. Made a little porch and learnt some new tricks. Found "edit profile" which is very nice, but couldn't resist adding some curves and next thing you know I was thinking about a different church, about my age, sitting on top of a hill in France.
So I spend the weekend modelling Ronchamp and in the process getting sidetracked again, enhancing images with Photoshop. I will go into more depth on Le Corbusier's chapel in another post. Today the focus is on image processing.

It used to bother me that my most popular page is the one about combining images. After all this is a Revit blog. But then I realised that these are Revit users, people who maybe haven't plunged deep into photoshop, but seriously need to enhance their output from Revit.

My normal rule is "15 minutes of pain". Pain means making an image that doesn't automatically update when you change the model. If it takes less than 15 minutes to do this, you can balance the pain against the gain. Even if you have to do it 2 or 3 times with 5 or 6 images. Sometimes though it is worth breaking the rule. Maybe for one killer image, or perhaps you just want to explore the software and improve your skills; learn new tricks you can use again and again on the 15 minute production line.

Modelling the roof was quite a challenge. I had a sheet where I was placing jpegs side by side with Revit views. This really helps you to judge scale and proportion. But that roof is quite tricky.

So half way through I decided to treat myself to a bit of rendering and photo-editing. I had two images which I put together in the normal way on separate layers with a mask to make the shaded view transparent in the middle and gradually becoming dominant towards the edges.
You just need a big soft brush with low transparency. Gradually make the brush smaller (press the square bracket keys) and keep dabbing the brush on so the mask gets darker in the middle. You could use a gradient fill, but the brush gives me more control. Each image is a bit different and I might want to add some darker spots at points of interest so that the render shows through.

Next I decided to add in the missing roof overhang. I created a selection around the area, using the lassoo tool, then applied a gradient fill (from black to white). Looks very crude, but we can fix that. I had placed the gradient on its own layer, so it's easy to make this slightly transparent and adjust the colour balance.

The whole roof is too light, so I made another lasso selection set. This time I saved the selection (as a channel) so I can get it back later. Used levels and colour balance adjustments on both the layers.

Now I had an image from the web that I used to set up this perspective in the first place. I was using it to check the proportions as I was modelling. My roof is far from perfect but it would have been far worse without this little trick. So I brought in this photo. Just drag it into photoshop. Ctri-A (select all) Ctrl-C (copy to clipboard, switch to the other window and Ctrl-V (paste into new layer) Make the layer 50% transparent, hit Ctrl-T (free transform) and drag the corner with the shift key held down to scale the image to fit.

You can see that my roof is still way off, but I'm going to accept that for this image. All I want from the photo are a few little details around the edges to create the illusion of reality. So I create a mask and fill it with grey. If I made it all black the photo would be completely transparent so I couldn't see what I was doing. Now I add white to the mask for the areas I want to show. I need the trees, the external balcony and altar and the path. Once I have the white (or pale grey) in place I can crank up the levels so the darker grey areas turn to black hiding the rest of the photo.

I have a library of people & trees etc on white backgrounds that I have collected over the years. If I drag these in onto a new layer and set it to "Multiply" the white will disappear. Take care with placement and scaling of figures. I always site their layers to about 75% transparency to blend in better. Add some trees and some birds. Scaling and placement are crucial. You can learn all the software tricks you like, but it's never a substitute for composition. You need a good eye and that usually comes from drawing by hand. The digital world is great, but don't neglect your own hand-eye skills. The computer inside your head is the sine qua non of successful image making.

The birds have gone in at about 30% transparency. Everything fades with distance. Just for fun I added a lens flare to the edge of the roof over the entrance. Actually this is quite an interesting composition because the main centre of interest is the chapel entrance way over to the bottom left. I'm using the girl and the tree to bounce your eye into the four guys. Also the birds and the lens flare act as vertical markers. I wasn't really thinking about this consciously at the time but that's how it works. Then there's a second focus of interest way over to the right, and again I'm using trees and people to guide you in to the altar.

By the way, one trick to placing people is to have a thin horizontal shadow line where they touch the ground. Needs to be subtly done, with transparency.
I like the subtle colours of this image, very misty with faded browns and blues. But after saving the image I decided to play around with some filters. Cranking up the saturation and contrast, then using chalk & charcoal effect. You can also combine these on different layers and use masks again to fade from one to the other. The are plenty of choices. You need to have a clear idea of the image that suits your design concept. You also need to ask yourself whether your images bear any relation to reality. Smoke and mirrors is all very well, but at some point your client is looking for a real building.

Next one uses "graphic pen" flter, then an interior shot that needed quite heavy processing to disguise the crudeness of the render. Using pixelise as well as the usual masks and layering to create an image that captures the idea of a minimalist space that glows with filtered light.

Last 2 images feature inverting one of the layers and making a feature of the transparency to reveal structural elements, then one with coloured pencil effect that fades to white at the edges.

I have been referring to Photoshop, but there are freeware offerings out there (Gimp for example) that can do most of the same stuff. I sometimes feel a bit guilty when I spend two or three hours building up an image with a dozen or more layers, but it's a learning experience and you need that depth of learning to hone your skills for the 15 minute factory that will take the multiple views that Revit can churn out and convert them into really compelling and atmospheric images.

MORE SOAP PLEASE

2011-12-11T13:24:00.000+04:00

Second bite at the Iconic New York offices of industrial soap giants Unilever. My initial massing model raised various questions and I was able to answer most of these with a bit of web research. Google street view and Great Buildings.com were particularly useful. To confirm this new knowledge I constructed a second massing model, coloured up to highlight the main functional elements.
This is a series of old-fashioned extrusions modelled in-place. I chose the Mechanical Equipment category because I'm not expecting to use this later. This provides a simple way to isolate or hide this second massing model in different views.

Now I have a pretty good grasp of the 3 dimensional form and incidentally the model that comes up in Google 3d buildings is very misleading in this regard. I wonder who vets these models. Did anyone think of approaching SOM ? My next goal was to quickly flesh the massing model out with curtain walls & floors.

The horizontal mullions are unevenly spaced with 2 small opaque spandrels below each clear glass panel. You can't create this directly from the dialogue box. It would be possible to add in extra grid lines, then select rows of panels and change their type, but this is tedious. Instead I made a custom panel with embedded "transoms". This worked like a treat and was easily adpated to make a second panel family for the first floor glazing.

A third panel family has 4 equal panes of opaque material. Tab-select a single panel, right-click/select horizontal row, unpin (wait for this to take effect) and change the panel type in the type selector. For the plant room louvres I made a sub-type of the original family and changed the glass material to "louvres". The material uses a horizontal fill pattern in shaded views and a cut-out for rendering. You can go to the trouble of making fully 3 dimensional louvres if you like, but it's a lot of effort for little gain and will slow your model down.

I don't think I have the mullion spacing 100 percent correct yet, but it renders up quite convincingly. Would be more life-like with some internal lighting and blinds pulled down to various different heights. But that will have to be another weekend.

For now I will finish with a couple more renders. If you look carefully at the last one you will see a vertical mullion near the corner that shouldn't be there. But remember, my goal is to use Revit as a research tool. Success is not judged by the perfection of the model, but by the learning process it enables.

BITS & BOBS

2011-12-06T20:28:00.001+04:00

Just in case you think I spend all day preparing posts on St Mary Axe, I'm going to share a few snapshots from my "day job". These are all from projects I've been assisting with Revit support over the past few weeks..

First some walls & railings based on a well known islamic pattern. Just quick design-development images knocked up in a couple of hours or so.

Second one is a very nice project that I hope will go ahead soon. These images were created from a quick model I made for some training sessions. It's a very steep site overlooking the sea.

Third project is apartments in a more urban setting. I had fun here using a kind of lego-blocks approach to quickly compare different massing options and then adding a bit of facade detail to generate visuals. An interesting exercise in early concept design work. I will explain this a bit better when I get time.

The fourth project was a quick masterplanning exercise. Again it was a chance to explore new ways of using Revit at concept stage and some useful lessons learnt. Simple massing model of a housing unit. Schedules that count them up as you go. Linear & Radial arrays to space them out quickly along the streetscape.

Another image of the islamic pattern wall placed in context. This is ongoing development of a project that I've been working on for just over a year now.

Finally another shot of the hillside resort. Some early attempts to study the way that the room blocks and interlinking pathways interact with the hillside. I've enjoyed focussing my attention on how to model in a schematic, semi-abstract way so that the design remains flexible and options can be explored rapidly.

GRASPING THE GHERKIN

2011-12-05T08:54:00.001+04:00

I'm grasping for a deeper understanding of the Swiss Re building, using Revit as an investigative tool. Construction photos from the net reveal a tubular steel framework beneath the cladding ... a series of A frame modules bolted together to form a triangular lattice.

I had a couple of tries at making this component. First attempt was a 3-pick adaptive component. Couldn't control the verticality of the central node. Second time around I made the node using a conventional Generic Model template and embedded this in an adapative component, but no adaptive points.

I just used the adpative template to access the conceptual massing tools. I wanted a hybrid family: reference-plane geometry for the central node, point-based freedom for the splayed legs. The result is far from perfect, but it's good enough to take me forward as I journey into the heart and soul of the gherkin.

It would be possible to use hand-sketches and CAD diagrams for this kind of investigation, but there's nothing like a BIM model for illuminating complex geometrical relationships. Each tier of A frames has a slightly different tilt angle and base width. Each floor slab is rotated 5 degrees and slightly larger than the last. Even floor levels line up with the nodes, odd floor levels meet the A frames half way up the legs.

First thing I noticed was that the legs need more tilt than I expected. You need about 400mm of tilt just to form a cylinder. To understand this better I built a component that would stack up to form a cylinder. Oddly enough this looks like a huge pineapple ring. I seem to be trapped inside a world of fruit & vegetable metaphors.

This quickly confirmed that the upright triangles do indeed lean outwards. However balance is maintained because the inverse triangles lean inwards by a similar amount. And so the alternating triangles take you around the ring in facets.

The component itself is another old-fashioned generic model, this time based on a blend. 18 sided polygons top and bottom, with a 10 degree rotation. Had to to a bit of vertex editing to split the resulting parallelograms into triangles. I added a circular void to represent the core.

To transform the cylinder into a gherkin (or a pineapple) we need parametric control over the size of the two polygons. What's happening here is that I'm using a different method to arrive at the same shape that I created before using pattern based curtain panels. Except that this time the panels are flat triangles (as opposed to curved rhomboids)

So we need to add two parameters to the pineapple ring family. I tried dimensioning from the origin (intersection of two reference planes), but when you flex this the results are unpredictable. I could have swiched to point-based geometry again by using an adaptive component, but instead I created an array of reference lines at the origin and dimensioned from these to the perimeter of each polygon. This simple trick prevents the angles from slipping out of alignment.

At this point it seemed useful to draw a plan diagram to summarise my understanding of gherkin geometry. The circle is divided into 18 segments of 20 degrees each. Each pineapple ring represents 2 storeys and is rotated by 10 degrees so that triangles line up in pairs to form rhomboids. So the floors rotate by 5 degrees causing the 6 triangular voids to spiral. The six portions of useable office space are centred on the gap between pairs of successive openings in the floor slab, hence the 2.5 degree rotation.

Now the justification for this elaborate form is that you achieve clear floor space with a relatively lighweight structure. It's a bit like those lightweight paper bins made from steel mesh, or think open weave fruit baskets, or maybe lobster traps. The combination of curvature and triangulation makes for a very elegant self-bracing structure, more elegant I think than the Hearst Tower in New York, also by Foster. And while we are making comparisons, I'm also reminded of a little glass pavilion by Bruno Taut.

But however clever the external shell, the column-free office space relies on conventional beams spanning from core to perimeter. At maximum diameter the spans are around 15 metres, which is quite a stretch. These beams are like spokes of a wheel, 36 spokes = 10 degree spacing. The 5 degree rotatin of floor levels results in 2 basic conditions. At odd floor levels spokes hit on node points, so you also need a beam between nodes to carry every second spoke. But at even floor levels each spoke coincides with the mid-point of a tubular leg. One obvious point here is that this is not a pure structural form. Space frames gain elegance and efficiency by treating nodes as hinges so that all the struts are in pure tension or compression. But here we have loads at mid-span on both horizontal and diagonal members: a hybrid structural form.

The Floor Plate is another simple Generic Model family with a radius parameter that varies from floor to floor. Once I added the beams to this and placed a camera looking up into the structure I had a view that seemed worth rendering. What took me by surprise though was how much easier it is to read the rendered view, to grasp the spatial relationships. Clearly there are subtle depth cues that the shaded view lacks and that our brains use to interpret the scene at a subconscious level. Previousl I had thought of real-time rendering as a fancy marketing tool, but now I am thinking that it can really help us during design development.

I think that's enough for one post. Lots more to learn though so I will return to the gherkin model another time. One final render to conclude this episode.

A BIT OF LEVERAGE

2011-11-28T07:55:00.003+04:00

I have this ongoing project called "the way we build". It started with the "Let's Build Zimbabwe" textbook series that I worked on in the early 80s, targeted at secondary school students. I thought there was potential to expand this and offer it to a much broader audience.

I want to emphasize PROCESS: the activity of building. This is often neglected in construction textbooks, You get diagrams of Flemish Bond, and cross-sections through a finished window sills, but little sense of the physical activities that produce these end results. That's "the WAY we build."

Then there is "the way WE build." We all build differently. It may be climate, available materials, personal prejudice, expression of identity ... Whether you analyse the pyramids or a mud hut, the technology and the politics are inseparable.

So this weekend I made a massing model of the Lever Building. When I visited this about 3 years ago, I was astounded at the condition it was in, but later discovered it had undergone a major refurbishment some 10 years previously. The building is almost exactly the same age as me and is a classic of its age. Pioneering use of curtain walling and suspended cleaning cradle. Piloti enable a generous plaza to be donated to the public realm. The main tower cantilevers some 3m beyond the column line to dramatise the separation of horizontal and vertical masses.

As always I gained new insights from the exercise and stumbled across new questions for further research. Just where is (or was) the auditorium ? Was it for staff or public use ? Does it still exist ? I have a section drawing showing one basement level, is this parking ? Which space was converted into a public restaurant in 2004? I now have some of the answers but I'll come back to that another time.
Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, location of the Larkin Mail-Order Soap Company. So he was almost the same age as another famous office building with social and environmental pretensions. I read a couple of weeks ago that Foster was doing open plan offices before they became fashionable. This may be so, but the soap companies were at it in the states 100 years ago.

Apparently Larkin pioneered all kinds of marketing techniques too, but the supermarkets destroyed their business around the time Lever House was being built, and Buffalo had Wright's building demolished in punishment for unpaid taxes.

Perhaps the folksy family marketing approach of Larkin was wiped out by the clinical strategies of modern multi-nationals like Unilever. The Larkin Building belongs to the days of innocence before World War I, Lever House to the brave new world after World War II when everyone was eager to sweep away the mistakes of the past.

Returning to my Revit model, a few observations on techniques used, nothing original. For the elevations I placed simple gradient jpegs directly in the view & cranked up the shadows to 75%. Isolating the mass floor faces in a view can be very effective. Here I selected individual faces and used overide by element to change the surface pattern to a different solid colour. This results in a very effective vertical zoning diagram. I also rounded off areas to the nearest 10 sq m under Project Units. Without this the schedule would display a misleading level of accuracy.

This is a good example of a situation where it is useful to have 2 versions of the same schedule. I just needed to summarise all the typical floors in a single line: easily achieved by un-ticking "itemize every instance" ... and then adding a comments field to give dummy labels to the floor levels.

In the final version most of the information is hidden, so a working schedule is very useful to cross-check that all the data is correct. Simple, but effective.

It would be nice if there were a more elegant way to achieve this. I am looking forward to the day when schedules are much more powerful and flexible. They are, after all, the "I in BIM" and surely deserve a more prominent and profficient role in the process.

I will finish with some 2d Drafting in preparation for making the curtain wall.

Aluminium curtain walls came in with the 70s. This one is all steel, and rather than a clear separation between structural frame and cladding as we would expect today, there seems to be a gradation. I have a very grainy construction photo showing horizontal angles and vertical channels following hard on the heels of the main frame. The angles also provide support for masonry infill (cinder blocks). It's an interesting sequence of operations.

I'm not sure what "heat resistant glass" means. In the 70s, when I was a bricklayer in the UK, "U" values were just starting to be taken seriously. I would like to know the spec of the glass used in the refurbishment. It doesn't look thick enough to be double-glazing, but is said to meet modern thermal standards.

GHERKIN TAKE 1

2011-11-20T09:21:00.003+04:00

The mind is a strange thing. It loves to wander randomly making unexpected associations and diversions. Perhaps this is the key to the emergence of artistic expression often dated to around 40 thousand years ago. Whenever I'm sitting at my laptop working away on some urgent deadline, part of my brain is wandering off on it's own. Seems like it takes the adrenalin shot associated with serious physical danger to focus our attention narrowly on the task at hand.

So despite having several more urgent tasks on my list, I found myself modelling the Gherkin this weekend. They used to say that if your want to understand something, draw it. There is freehand drawing, T-square drawing, CAD drawing and BIM drawing. These days I find the best way to get deep inside a building's soul is to make a Revit model. For 30 St Mary Axe I set up 40 levels with a typical floor to floor of 4.2m I set the first floor at 8.7m on the basis that the crossing point of the diagonals is about a foot (300mm) below floor level. These are all "intelligent guesses" but I don't think they are far off.

I had a source saying that the diameter at ground level is 50m, increasing to a maximum of 57m at level 17. So I went into in-place mass mode and placed these 2 circles using reference lines. Looking carefully at the finished form you can see that the radius gets progressively smaller over the last few floors, so I placed 3 more circles towards the top, selected all 5 and hit "Create form".
Because they are Reference Lines, the circles still exist inside the form, you can select them and change their offset levels and radii. So I did just that, and tweaked the form till it looked right.

Next stage is to select the surface and divide it. There are going to be 2 masses, one slightly smaller one for the large white structural grid, and the bigger one for the glazed skin which is framed in black mullions. Both of them are Rhomboid (Diamonds) and the structural grid is 4 times as big as the skin.
The structural grid is 11 diamonds high (4 storeys each), with 18 diamonds around the circumference (20 degrees each) So the glazing grid is 44 diamonds high (including a double height ground floor and triple height top) with 72 modules around the full circle )5 degrees each.

In Revit, the Rhomboid grid is derived from 4 squares, so you need to double up all the numbers. But the mass comes in two halves, so the U/V grid numbers end up being 22/18 and 88/72. I did it by trial and error.

Now we need a curtain panel. The structural members are also diamond shaped in section, so I made a profile for this. Host it on a point in the Rhomboid template, make form and you have a sweep.

I decided to use the same family for the glazing so I added a glass surface with a visibility control and linked the profile dimensions to parameters in the panel family.

Once this was loaded into the project and applied to the mass, a couple of problems cropped up. The sharp corners were sticking out at every joint right at the top everything was distorted and spiky. I just deleted the top 2 rows on the basis that the structure changes up there in real life. For the other problem I added a void in the family to cut the corners off. There's still a bit of overlap at the join, but I decided to move on.

For the glazing I made a second mass with circles offset by half a metre. By the time I had this kitted out with panels everything had slowed down. No problem with normal working, but as soon as you change any parameters affecting the curtain panels, be prepared to make a cup of tea.

Next complaint is to do with changing individual curtain panels. Had to delete a whole bunch at the bottom to make the entrance etc. There seems to be no alternative to selecting one by one. With the delayed response it was taking me 5 or 6 seconds to delete each panel. Not good. Ideally I would have selected hundreds of panels going up in spirals and changed them to a darker coloured glass, but I didn't have the patience. There has to be a better way.

I started to put in floors and explore the geometry of these spirals. There are light wells/ventilation shafts behind the dark glass: triangular voids that rotate by 5 degrees (one glazing module) from one floor to the next. Some of these are 2 storeys high and some link 6 storeys. I need more time to work this out in the model.

Did some trial renders on the entrance and compared the result with a picture I took 2 years ago. In the end I couldn't resist compiling a render, a shaded view and the photo into a composite image. The live photo is only used around the entrance area. It adds the subtlety of the internal lighting and the realism of the street lights and the taxi. I masked out the structural frame and the glazing, so this is all from Revit, but the dark glass is faked by drawing a selection around those areas and adjusting levels.

CANDELA POWER

2011-11-17T21:17:00.000+04:00

So I'm off for the weekend now, but just managed to squeeze in a couple of hours after work to get some scaleability going. First attempt was not very pretty, but second time around I got the hang of it. Hopefully time to cobble together an explanation over the next 2 days.

There is a type parameter called "Scale" and I have 3 types in here with values of 10, 20 & 30. Then I have 3 instance parameters which work together to make the whole thing flatter or spikier. Each shell is made of 4 nested Hypar families in a circular array.

And inside the Hypar family I have a nested profile to create one of the voids. All the voids scale up with the solid by means of linked parameters. Couple of simple formulas in there, nothing too scary.

That's all for now. See you next week

hyp hop

2011-11-16T22:05:00.000+04:00

Don't know what set me off on this. Was getting a bit bogged down at work so after hours I started playing with Hypars. It's all a bit messy at the moment, so I just have a few screenshots to share.

This is four copies of a nested family ... and there are parameters in there that work moderately well.

But it's not yet fully coordinated. I need to understand the geometry a bit better to get the void cuts to flex in harmony with the shell. The goal of course is to end up with a family with just 3 or 4 parameters that give effective control.

It's tricky though. So I'm calling it a day at 10pm and maybe come back to it fresh over the weekend.

JUST PARKING

2011-11-14T08:17:00.002+04:00

I'm having difficulty finishing off my posts at the moment. Lots of stuff that is almost ready, but between catching flu and multiple deadlines at GAJ I can't quite get them on to the blog. So this is a quick one based on something I've cobbled together recently.

This is the bog-standard parking bay that comes with Revit, but I've added in the simplified car family that I made a while back, plus a wheelchair symbol, given these visibility controls (instance parameters) and also linked the car material to an instance parameter.

All simple stuff, but it gives you a parking bay that schedules in a completely regular way, while having a more random look in 3d and on plan ... like real parking bays. Recently I added an extrusion to represent the paving surface in a masterplanning study. This is OK, but it doesn't respond to the angle parameters built in to the original family at the moment.

Judicious use of visibility controls at coarse, medium and fine scales can allow you to vary the amount of information shown in plan views eg. no car at all, car outline, detailed car.

WINNING WAYS

2011-11-01T16:11:00.002+04:00

Exciting day today. I treated all the Revit Lunch regulars at GAJ to Biryani in place of my usual Revit presentation ... this to celebrate winning the prestigious Pumpkin Award. Needless to say I am indebted to all the Revit enthusiasts here at Godwin Austen Johnson who have supported & motivated me over the past 6 years or so, not least Brian Johnson himself.

A great big thankyou to Zach for hosting the competition and for running his inspirational BUILDZ website. FOLLOW THIS LINK

The other two winners were serious pieces of work and I am honoured to be in such company. I took the "Goodest" award, the other 2 categories being "Baddest" & "Most Parametric". Lots of high-powered formulas on show, not to mention gnashing of teeth. Well done guys.

You can see my entry by reading the 6 previous posts in this blog. I went through quite a journey of exploration, reflecting on the digital tools we use to design buildings today and how they present us with many of the same issues that architects have been pondering for generations: order & disorder, image & reality ... but read the posts.

Eid Al Adha coming up here in the UAE, so that will give me time to prepare some more blog posts. Lots of ideas bubbling around in what's left of my brain cells, so come back and have a look about 8 days from now.

PUMPKIN POSTSCRIPT

2011-10-27T22:22:00.001+04:00

So what have I learnt ?

A lot ... never imagined where this jounrney would take me. But let's stand back and reflect. The basic premise of this exercise has been that pumpkins and doric columns can be treated as homologous structures.

METAMORPHOSIS
This is the essence of parametric families. I could easily now make a family that has 2 types: a pumpkin and a doric column

Not something I would use directly, but I suspect that the techniques developed here will have many applications. Plumbing & furniture families that can morph into different sizes and shapes perhaps.

SIMPLICITY (BOILING DOWN THE PUMPKIN)
I tried hard to simplify and organise my dialogue boxes, but I think they would still be pretty scary to the average user. What should the Type Parameters Dialogue for a Doric Column family look like in an ideal world ?

BIOMIMICRY
Revit is good at making shapes based on rules. But we also need to deal with the other end of the spectrum : soft, lumpy, irregular things. You can use an FBX workflow into Max. You can fake stuff in photoshop. But you can also introduce some irregularity of shape & texture in Revit. There is a long way to go though. Think thatched roofing, & rough stone walling. Not easy to do convincingly in Revit.

FILES
So it's been a long week and here in the desert our weekend started 5 hours ago. Time to upload what I have and leave the rest to Zach. File is HERE . 2012 version this time. Contents pictured below.

INTO THE VOID

2011-10-27T08:35:00.001+04:00

Post 5 for the Pumpkin Competition. Need to start carving.

To hollow out the middle we could use a revolve. Conceptual massing doesn't have a separate revolve tool, just draw an axis line and a closed loop like you would with the normal revolve tool, and "make void form".

So how about the eyes ? Make a triangular profile that is resizeable in a separate mass family. Load into project. Draw lines radiating out from the centre of the pumpkin, add angle parameters. Host a point on those lines, make reference plane visible, place triangle on plane. Selec line & triangle, make void, Revit knows it's a sweep.

Let's pause here. Is anyone else getting worried ? It's all getting too messy. How am I going to link all this together so it resizes as a unit ? What does it equate to in the real world ? Let's back up a bit and try something a bit simpler.

Imagine we want a hollow Doric column (precast or GRP maybe) All we need is another set of profiles, scaled down by a factor and used to define a void. Probably we want a smooth circular void. We already have a circle profile in this family, so it's easy to create another 3 types and link their radii to the outer profiles. This is nice, because we only have one more parameter for the end user to worry about. I called this "Void factor" and set it to 0.8 Inner Radius = Outer Radius x Void Factor

The result is still quite robust and versatile. I spent a little time on the dialogue box organisation & parameter naming. I've made an effort to arrange things logically and think about ease-of-use, but probably it could be distilled down further.

Need to be careful with the convex "pumpkin" versions because the shell can get too thin and the family breaks. Maybe we could find a way of linking the bulge factor & void factor together to avoid this. Clearly the re-entrant forms are going to be difficult, but there is potential here.

There's been a dynamic going between organic & geometric, make-it-look-like-a-pumpkin v do something useful & interesting, one off originality v the common good. And if I really wanted to make a pumpkin that is convincingly real, re-sizeable, with optional carved voids, I'm probably more than half-way there.

But the offshoots and by-products are too rich to ignore. So I let myself get carried away for a while. . There is a treasure-trove of semi-automated form finding on my doorstep now, with copious references to flowers, jellyfish, starfish, lemon-squeezers ... I'm also well on the way to a whole battery of classical column families.

Perhaps this whole exercise with its flip-flopping between pumpkins & columns is an apt metaphor for architecting in general. Oscillating back and forth between what we would like & what we can afford.

MUSHROOMS & MICE

2011-10-26T07:41:00.001+04:00

Post 4 of our Pumpkin Competition.

This one is just a series of random doodles. What else can I do with profiles ? How do I make a more realistic stem ? Hey that looks like a mushroom !

Place 5 points on a vertical plane. Make a spline-by-points Set their work planes to always show. Host the 5 profiles on these planes. (took a bit of coaxing) Play with different radii and move the points about manually (push-pull) Make the top two points adaptive (shape handle)

Now I can take it into the project and fiddle with how the top of the stem curls over. All a bit sluggish (delayed response), but quite interesting. I've reverted to using 2011 so that the downloads will be more accessible. This means the adaptive component has to be placed in an in-place mass family, not directly in the project. No big deal.

Oops, now Florence is back, and the cat too. Looks like a stage set with a painted backdrop, it's a problem we often face with RPC content: wonderful clever stuff, but watch out for the 2 dimensional give-aways. Still, it gives me a chance to show off a bit in photoshop. who wants a totally photo-real world anyway ? And there's carving too, not parametric yet, but real pumpkin-face carving. I love the way that Alice & Florence both seem to be staring at the Cheshire cat. Maybe there are mice hiding in the pumpkin. Something's making kitty's eyes light up. It's also quite neat how the water-colour effect makes the two RPC trees blend with the background image.

OK, so I've added the mice, and it's all getting a bit silly. But the point is that sometimes these "random accidents" can point to serious possibilities. We are always playing in the space between image and reality, 3 dimensional experience & 2 dimensional diagram. It's largely a question of how you navigate back & forth between these different worlds. And suddenly I'm reminded of the most prosaic example. Bannister Fletcher's page on the Doric Order.

Once again it's the juxtaposition of different scales and modes of drawing in order to compress a complex information set into a single image. For sure BIM is changing our world, and we have to open our minds to new possibilities, possibly the demise of the "construction drawing" as we know it, but let's also remain alert to unexpected parallels and lessons from the past.

GOING ORGANIC

2011-10-25T08:12:00.001+04:00

Post number 3 of my pumpkin carving competition entry.

OK so the first image is a nice diagram that Wil sent me. It explains the derivation of the formulae in his original family. Now I understand better what he was driving at. Probably more scientific than my "Bulge Factor" approach, but I'm going to persevere for the moment with my nested profiles. In fact I'm going for a "Five Stack" this time around.

You may notice that the profile family looks neater now. I've got the whole "select-filter-copyrotate" routine down now. But that's probably a separate post.

Using 5 profiles is a bit more hard work, but it gives me more options for sculpting the shape. This time I want to focus on a more realistic, organic looking pumpkin. So this represents the opposite pole to that whole Doric, pure-geometry approach to Design.

Now I'm getting a rounded volume with a depressed centre. But it's still too regular.

I can play with the render settings. Give it a bump map. This one is based on the Leather Fabrics, but with the depth of the bump map cranked up.

Looking at images of pumpkins I got the feeling that my segments were too regular. So I made another profile, being deliberately sloppy with the setting out. This is better, but I need to give one or two segments an extra bulge. I also reached into my bottom drawer for a render texture image that I made a while back to simulate old walling (we do resorts that capture the feel of a desert village, see this link : Bab al Shams by GAJ ) It has a large-scale blotchiness.

Rendered up, the result is starting to get there. The stack of 5 profiles also gives more control over the stem. I can keep most of it thin then just bulge out quickly at the base. No way to achieve that with only 3 profiles. Would be better if it curved to one side, but that needs a different family with profiles swept along a path. While I am busy messing with the render settings I sneaked in a background image from the bit in Cinderella where the fairy godmother transforms the pumpkin into a carriage.

I haven't used the background image in renders much before. I like the way the automatic sky responds to different times of day. Flat images of the sky tend to look a bit ... flat. But perhaps there is scope for using images in a more diagramatic context. It's OK to be flat when you are not trying for that ultra-photo-real effect.

In the end, everything we do is a diagram, and sometimes a simple thumbnail sketch is the best way of communicating an idea. We should spend more time thinking about what is the BIM equivalent to this.

The massing tools are one approach, but there must be many others. Just because it's an intelligent 3d model it doesn't have to be so complex that you can't see the wood for the trees. For example, a while ago I made a Revit version of one of Corb's simple diagrams. "Less is more" as a cigar-smoking German once said.

WHEN IS A PUMPKIN NOT A PUMPKIN

2011-10-24T07:56:00.009+04:00

This is post no 2 of our competition entry. Zach is watching, so behave yourselves.

Pumpkins are well know for their metamorphic properties as Cinderella would be quick to point out. I haven't quite got the coach & horses down yet (still looking for some suitable mice) but the transformations are proceeding apace.

First off was the 20 volute column. Turned out to be quite easy to filter-select and copy-rotate elements to double up the number of points and parameters in my profile. Had to dissolve it first of course and later on select the points, 3 at a time, to do the spline-by-points trick again for each of the 20 volutes.

After that it's a question of creating a parameter for the profile name, so we can choose what to use for base, mid and top. Then associate the radii with parameters R1, R2 & R3 so that I can control the size of each profile from within the host family. Hey presto you get a really nice scaleable Doric column shaft from the same family that made the original pumpkin,

So far this has been done in a Generic Model "Adaptive" family. So it can be converted to another category, EXCEPT for mass. To prove the scaleability I set up another version of the family by loading my profile into a conceptual mass family template. Jack this up to 75 metres high with a base diameter of 10m and we're away.

The base was modelled in-place, mass-floors put in, and then straight on to wall-by-face. Click, click, click go my 20 volutes. I tested out changing the size of the mass family and using "update to face", works fine. Windows go in, copy them up from floor to floor, no problem. Half an hour and I have the basic shell of the building done.

The two doric columns at the main entrance are metamorphosed pumpkins, 3 times over. Confused ? Simple. One for the shaft, one for the echinuus (based on a cirular profile) and one for the abacus (square profile)

So by now I have 4 different profile families loaded into my pumpkin host, and by playing with parameters I can create all kinds of forms, including re-entrant shapes. And pumpkins of course.

How about egg-cups, golf tees, crown-of-thorn cathedrals ... lots of possibilities here

I'll finish with a render of the Tribune scheme by Loos. The windows are not quite right yet, and there should be 28 volutes, not 20. Seems he cheated a bit to get the plan to work. (been there)

I guess you could count the windows as "carving", but I'd like to do some parametric voids that do clever stuff. Any ideas ?

If you want to contribute, you can pick up my parametric doric pumpkin family form here.
Anything half decent will get included in my next post.

5 stack pumpkins 2011

Actually this is the 5 profile version, opens with Revit 2011 & later. More about that tomorrow.

EXPLORING PUMPKINLAND

2011-10-23T07:51:00.006+04:00

I was going to leave this to the last minute so as nobody else could pinch my ideas, then I thought "why are you doing that ? If you really believe in open collaboration you need to put it out there and see what happens" After all this is inspired by Wil from the land of windmills & legalised marijuana who read my "Lunch with the Gods" piece, and took up the challenge to make a parametric Doric column.

I opened this up on Thursday and was truly inspired. Lots of parameters whose names obviously make sense in Dutch, and formulas that I only half understood, but the result is a doric column shaft that you can resize at Will (as it were) A great big thankyou to Wil for contributing a family to the Shades of Grey community.

Now it so happened that Wil mentioned that he got part of his inspiration from Zach Kron's blog. Just about everybody who uses the conceptual massing tools has been inspired by Zach, but this jogged my memory that the 3rd annual pumpkin carving competition is imminent.

Lightbulb moment. Wouldn't take much tweaking to make a parametric doric column morph into a pumpkin.

So on Thursday afternoon (in between Revit training with Ignacio, John & cezar and making a door family for Sabu) I played out another hunch. David Light posted a while back about using profiles in conceptual massing. Why couldn't I convert Wil's family into mass profiles nested inside an adaptive component. 3 Profiles with variable radii, (placed on 3 separate workplanes) would surely give me what I was looking for.

The first attempt didn't work because Will had used reference lines (very cleverly) to create the rig for his profile. That's OK as long as the profiles are created directly in the family. You can select the lines you want to use to create a form. But I thought it would be more elegant to nest the profiles. Problem is Revit tries to create a form from every line or reference line within that nested family. Turns out though that you can host points on reference PLANES, and still set up parameters to control them. You need quite a lot of dimensions, (and to tab them to snap to your points), but it works fine.

HINT: use a mass family to create the profile. Don't try to use the profile family template like you would for railings etc. The 3 profiles give me nice entasis on the columns, and I can reverse this to create a stalk for the tops of my pumpkins. By using a "bulge factor" to set the ratio between the two imaginary diameters, I can reverse the curve from convex to concave. A ratio of 1.2 is concave and 0.8 is convex. You are just playing with whether the points for the centres of the curves are inside or outside the end points.

For a proper Doric column you need 20 volutes, but I wanted to test my idea first so I set up 10, which is more realistic for a pumpkin in any case. So there are still a few days to go before Halloween. Where should I take this next ? I am thinking ... OK we have an interesting jump in scale from the pumpkin you buy at the corner shop, via giant competition pumpkin, small column in your garden ... whopping big column at Paestum. Why not jump again ? Massing is supposed to be a framework for early design of multi-storey buildings, so why not do Adolf Loos' 1922 entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition.

Any other ideas out there ? We could have a competition within a competition. How about the carving aspect ? I haven't done any of that yet, apart from the Cheshire cat grins I faked in photoshop. There must be a cool way to cut parametric voids into my family. Remember it would need to scale up with the rest of the family somehow.

HITTING THE CEILING

2011-10-19T19:31:00.007+04:00

Got a comment from Julio a couple of weeks ago asking how to make a recessed lighting cornice. See beam-me-up-scotty

I thought this would making an interesting little tutorial for my guys and featured it in one of my Revit Lunches, but since then things have been a bit crazy and I forgot all about it. Stumbled across it again today by accident and decided to turn it into a post. Bit rough and ready, but hope some of you find it useful.

This is the (almost) finished article. Should put another light fitting in there to kill the dark spot, but I need to go home to get some sleep so I'm not going to re-make this image today.

This is a ceiling hosted family so go to new family, & choose the ceiling hosted template.

Set up some reference planes with equalised width & length parameters. Create an "opening" and lock the sketch to the ref planes. Might as well make width & length instance parameters so you can easily stretch it to different sizes.

Next we need an extrusion for the sides. This will be a rectangle locked to the same reference planes and "copy-offset" by say 20mm so that we get a hollow box around the edges of the opening.

Go into a side view and create reference planes for the height of the box and the thickness of the upper ceiling board. Then back to plan view to create another extrusion for the upper ceiling.

By now you have 3 objects all locked to the same reference planes. You want them all locked to the reference planes, and not to each other, otherwise you might get that nasty message saying you have a circular chain of references.

A simple way to handle this, is to hide the other objects with the sunglasses (temporary hide) tool while drawing the sketch for each extrusion. That way you can only see the reference planes so you know that is what you are snapping to.

Now we want a cornice moulding. This is a sweep and the path is locked to those same 4 reference planes once again. The profile could be sketched directly in the family, but I prefer to load a profile family. That way I can set a parameter to choose between loaded profiles. Now the family is very versatile within the project. You can set up types with different heights and moulding profiles, and instances with different dimensions in plan.

This is one profile that I created which can be resized using just 2 parameters. Check out the visual below for how this is achieved.

The lights can be loaded directly in the project and placed behind the cornice. I used the "M_Uplight - Strip" family supplied with Revit Architecture. One last tip. To set the equality constraints on the ogee curve in the profile family, you need to "tab select" to persuade the dimension tool to pick up the end point of the arc.

Download the family here : coffer family

RETAIL REPAIRS

2011-10-06T07:35:00.000+04:00

Oh dear. First I forgot to share the file in google docs, then it turned out my furniture collection had 2 corrupt elements. So I ran an audit this morning, resaved and zipped the file. Loaded it up and shared it. Creating a new link which I will ask Raina to check in a couple of minutes.

Furniture Collection 1a.zip

Humble apologies. Hope it works now

COME SHOP WITH ME

2011-10-02T08:26:00.001+04:00

Shops I have known

Firstly what used to be my Uncle Bill's chip shop in Barnsley, as it looks now. Next a picture I took circa 1967 of a shop I used to pass every day on the way home from school. Finally a shop in Kampala, snapped when I visited Uganda a couple of years back.

And this is my shop. You may download the whole thing on condition that you donate 50 million zimdollars to your favourite charity. Alternatively you can opt to smile at every one you meet for a whole day. Click here to DOWNLOAD

Furniture 1a.zip

Next pic is Dubai Mall. Sometimes drop by here on the way home. Bit different from my walk home in Barnsley 44 years ago. Now I drive down a six lane highway. The mall has an ice rink and a 3 storey high aquarium with sharks, it's next to the tallest building in the world and has the biggest singing/dancing fountains on the planet too. It's a fun place to chill out after a hard day at the office :)

But what is Fair Trade ? How would you define it ? Does it have anything to do with the vast disparities between Dubai Mall and the wooden shops of Kampala's informal suburbs. What kind of world is it where I live in this space-station plonked down in the desert and go for a holiday in Africa's slums ?

Received wisdom of the sustainability lobby in Europe and North America argues for buying locally grown food. Save the air miles ... hard to fault that logic. But what about the women growing vegetables and cut flowers in Kenya just to keep their extended families alive. Should we be sabotaging their market ?

No black and white answers to these questions, which is why my blog is "shades of grey". So I'm sharing my families with you guys and I'm hoping we can all find ways of sharing with the wider world out there most of whom have no idea what Revit is and may be more concerned about access to a decent water supply.

My last pic is a bicycle which represents a young Ugandan's livelihood. A constant stream of fit young fellows ride these bikes up a very steep hill to carry water from the river to a bustling little business centre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade

Fair trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade.

STAMP COLLECTION

2011-09-25T15:32:00.002+04:00

This is another post about my interactions with suppliers/manufacturers of building products. Creative Concrete Concepts started out doing stamped concrete and have broadened out into a range of cement-based finishes.

They gave us a CPD recently and I asked my usual question (do you know about BIM & Revit) and got the usual answer (not really, but we're willing to learn) So I've entered this dialogue where they send me jpegs and I demonstrate how these can be turned into Revit materials.

The plan is that this will generate the enthusiasm for them to take ownership of the project and make their entire range available in Revit format. This opens up a discussion about how best to present materials as a downloadable package, complete with image/bump map pairs, suitably scaled fill patterns, specification codes etc.

But first of all, lets make a material. The source image should avoid these common mistakes:

Image zoomed in to a small area, can't find the repeat
Taken from an oblique angle, distorts when you correct the perspective
Uneven brightness: dark on the left, pale on the right.

Step 1: crop the image to a rectangle that will repeat.

Step 2: offset the images so that the corners move to the middle
Step 3: make small adjustments to eliminate the cross-hairs effect
Step 4: save the image at an appropriate size

Step 5: change mode to grayscale
Step 6: enhance contrast
Step 7: save as bump map

Using this process you can create pairs of images for each material type. These will be used in the render definition, which is one of 4 tabs in the material dialogue.

The "Graphics" tab sets appearances used in construction drawings: surface appearance and cross-section hatch. The cut-pattern can be one of the standard drafting patterns supplied with Revit. The surface appearance needs to be a model pattern. This could be a "pat" file downloaded from the web, or you could use a programme to generate your own hatch.

For our office I have compiled a "collection" file of fill patterns which is available on the server. This grows with each new project and encourages basic naming standards for filled regions & fill patterns.
The last 2 tabs contain non-visual data (sometimes called the "I" in BIM) This is information that can be picked up in tags & schedules. Keynotes are potentially a very powerful feature because they provide the link to Specifications. We us the British NBS system, which I still prefer to the US Masterformat, but that's another post. Stamped concrete is going to come under section M10 and you will need to create some custom clauses here for the different patterns used on your project, perhaps M10/170A Proprietary Stamped Concrete Screed: type A, where type refers to the mould pattern and colour.

Revit will be able to calculate areas for type A, type B, type C ... and schedule this out with whatever information you type into the material properties.

Now won't it be nice when every brick manufacturer hands out Revit materials for their entire range with all this information already embedded. Not to mention tiles, rainscreen cladding, cultured stone, terrazzo, formica ... So I'm making the effort to get this message across to every supplier I meet, and if you all do the same. Surely it's achievable.

ANYONE FOR BIMICAD ?

2011-09-25T09:16:00.001+04:00

On Thursday afternoon I attended a "BIM Seminar" which had found its way into my inbox. From the agenda I had assumed this was to be a cross-platform discussion of BIM issues, which seemed to me a most refreshing idea.

In reality it turned out to be a sales pitch for ArchiCAD. I don't regret attending. It's a few years now since I used ArchiCAD and it was interesting to see how it has developed. There was also a session on VICO, software that has much in common with the likes of Navis Works, allowing construction managers to access the information in BIM models to drive their programming & critical path analyses.

It was a little strange though. Couldn't help feeling there was an attempt to hijack the term BIM.

Probably the highlight of the afternoon was the BIM explorer, an iPad app which allows clients & others to walk around exported Archicad models through a very simple interface. But again, why BIMx ? Do they intend to supply plug-ins for Revit and Bentley Architect, or is it really better called Archi-View. Not quite as cool, but perhaps more honest.

Personally I think Graphisoft are doing some interesting things and I'm glad that Revit isn't the only game in town. I would also like to see real BIM seminars taking place where ordinary architects, contractors, clients etc can discuss the implications of the changes we are facing as an industry, regardless of the proprietary software we have chosen.

What are the legal implications of handing over a digital model to the contractor ? If he cuts his own section at an arbitrary point through our model and finds that the full intricacies of the way materials join together is not captured in 3d, can he make a claim ? Or are we stuck forever in a world where the 2d paper prints (stamped & signed) are the only truly legal records of our design ?

IMAGE MANIPULATION

2011-09-20T14:03:00.002+04:00

Mental Ray renders are great, but sometimes you want something softer, more impressionistic. There are many ways of achieving this, but ideally I want to stay as close to the Revit workflow as I can. So I aim to limit any image manipulation outside of Revit to what I can achieve in 10-15 minutes.
You can see some examples on my "Revit work at GAJ" page

I usually start be combining a shaded or hidden line image with a render. Make sure they are both the same resolution, then it's just a simple ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-V to get one layered on top of the other.
Next step is to duplicate the background, apply a watercolour filter and fade this new layer to say 40% transparency

Finally, duplicate the hidden-line layer, and set the mode to overlay. Add a layer mask, and make the centre of the mask partly transparent by applying black with a big soft brush set to say 10% opacity. You are looking to create a mask that fades from dark grey in the middle to white at the edges, basically a big soft oval vignette. This creates a subtle fading towards the edges.

With practice you can create very nice images in less than 10 minutes. For best results you need to fine tune the transparencies and final image contrast levels to suit that particular image.

Some more examples below, including a "squiggled" DWG export overlaid on a live Revit view.

Combining rendered views with hand sketching can be very effective. This one was done to communicate our comments to a specialist rendering service employed by the client.

Have also experimented with Autodesk Impression. It's a free download, but you have to do a DWG export first, so the workflow gets a bit too elaborate for regular use.

One last thought. Wouldn't it be great if this kind of image could be produced internally in Revit. Some kind of plug-in maybe that allows you to combine a hidden line view with a render and set the transparency. I suspect it's beyond the capabilities of the API at the moment, but it would be very nice if you didn't have to leave Revit, create a jpeg, delete the old one from the sheet then position the new one carefully in the same place.

see this post Ronchy Images for more on image processing.

BEAM ME UP SCOTTY

2011-09-18T16:10:00.001+04:00

Scott Jezzard is a young Australian architect who I introduced to Revit 4 years ago. He left GAJ a few months ago and has been doing some very impressive freelance Interior Design work.

He's the kind of guy who always wants to stretch Revit to its limits (and beyond) He also has a background in fine art and sculpture, which shows in the modelling of some of the furniture families he custom-built for these renders.

The first 3 shots were modelled and rendered entirely in Revit. The care he took to get the materials and lighting right has really paid dividends.

One nice touch is the bump map/cutout associated with the Rug decal. Not something you're going to use all the time, but a very nice feature when you need it. If you've never experimented with this aspect of decals, give it a go, can be very effective.

If you want to go further than this with soft furnishings, you will have to export to 3d Max, which is exactly what Scott did for the next group of renders. Autodesk have an excellent workflow for this based on the FBX file format. It was Scott's first time to use this, but the results are excellent.
Max has a much more sophisticated set of modelling tools for tackling thinks like soft furnishings and buttoned leather. Also more controls for material definition and lighting effects. But its a complex program, so you need to be prepared to put in the time to learn its secrets.

The simplest solution for medium sized firms is to do most of your rendering in Revit, but have a couple of hotshot Max guys to handle the top end renders, particularly interiors with soft furnishings and rich materials.

A couple of screenshots from within Family Editor to close out this post, just to give a little insight into the use of swept blends and void cuts. Nice work in my opinion.

Scott is currently weighing up his options, and open to job offers in either Dubai or Australia, so if anyone out there is interested, let me know and I'll put you in touch. Buy now while stocks last :}

FIRST PRINCIPAL

2011-09-15T13:44:00.005+04:00

Last night we were at the Middle East Architect awards ceremony, held on the Palm Jumeirah, which is a short taxi ride from our offices. We had entered several categories and came away with 4 second places plus one outright winner.

Appropriately it was our boss, Brian Johnson who won : Principal of the Year 2011, in recognition of 30 years of outstanding work in the Region, including one of Dubai's first iconic buildings, the Creek Golf Club, which features on the 20 Dirham note. Not so many architectural practices who can hand out bank notes as business cards :)

This year there was a new category: BIM Project of the Year, and I am proud to say that we earned a "Highly Commended" second place for the work my Revit team has done on Saray Bandar Jissah in Oman. A big thank you for all the guys & gals on the team for all the effort they have put in over the past year on this challenging project.

This is a residential resort with about 350 villas, a short drive from Muscat . Advanced earthworks are due to start later this year. The setting is quite dramatic with jagged mountain ridges and valleys leading to an unspoilt beach on the India Ocean. Our Revit work ranged from Strategic Masterplanning to meticulous detailing of bathroom layouts.

We have a complex set of cross-linked and nested files in order to handle the complexity of the site within our hardware constraints. All the villas have 2 versions: the full villa with all the CD sheets and a simplified massing model, sufficient for most masterplanning exercises. We swop these links in and out as needed. There is a file for the overall topography, with holes cut in it for each group of villas. Typically we have 10 or 12 villas in each zone file, where we model all the platform levels, the cut and fill, the landscaping, streel lights etc.

The infrastructure engineers issue their drawings in separate packages arranged by sub-discipline. The Revit model has really helped us to see how the earthworks, surface drainage, retaining walls, etc fit together in 3 dimensions. In many cases of course they don't fit together, and very rarely do they take into account the architectural and landscape design requirements, partly because their work had to be completed far in advance of ours, so they are always trying to finalise things before we have been able to develop our designs properly.

Conversely the landscape designers are a couple of steps behind us and often only have 2 dimensional concept sketches, when we really need to finalise ground shaping levels with the engineers. Our masterplanning model has been a fantastic tool for highlighting critical issues that need to be resolved and obtaining sign-off of the decisions that matter so that the engineers can complete their tender package and the landscape guys know the parameters whithin which they will have to work when they move to detailed design.

At a smaller scale we have had to develop a strategy that allows a mass concrete marine wall to be built 2 years in advance to a pool specialist coming on site to construct infinity edge pools that overlook a salt-water lagoon. Once again it was essential to be able to visualise relationships between different elements owned by multiple stakeholders in the design team, and to think about sequences of operations. Revit has a great ability to duplicate views and hide elements so that you can simulate a construction sequence. The section box views are also crucial to this kind of coordination exercise.

For the bathrooms I went onto the Duravit & Hansgrohe sites to download 3d CAD models of the selected fittings and incorporated these into Revit families. Often these familes contain 3 or 4 nested components pre-configured into their correct relationships (toilet pan, TRH, push plate, hand spray, cistern boxing) If the relationships change, the families can be reloaded into the 50 or so bathroom types in the project to maintian consistency with very little effort. This is where the the "revise instantly" origin of the Revit name is vindicated.

Kitchens were done to similar level of detail, and our client put us through 3 or 4 design iterations, all presented in cutaway perspective views as well as traditional plans & elevations for each of the dozen or so kitchen types.

I'll try to do a more detailed post on some of the families we developed for this project soon, but to conclude here's a rendering of one of the villas done directly from the Revit model

THE WINTER OF REVIT CONTENT

2011-09-12T17:58:00.004+04:00

Apologies to Shakespeare, but we are heading for winter (good news here in the UAE) and Revit Content does seem to be popping up all over the place these days.

It took a long time for manufacturers to wake up to the world of BIM, and some of the content is barely useable, but the important thing is that the wheels are starting to turn. More and more people are getting involved, arguments are erupting over naming standards. The hive is buzzing away.

For example take a look at this site: REVIT WORKS

New Zealand based content providers who are churning out some excellent stuff. Will be interesting to see the "Door Factory" which takes more of an ArchiCAD style approach to making doors via a series of carefully designed dialogues. Andersen have adapted their Window Studio software to work in a similar manner as a Revit plug-in that generates door & window families. This is a good first attempt and a big time saver if you are specifying from their very extensive range, but the resulting families are not parametric in any way.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves with feedback from end users.

Window Studio here

We had a CPD from the local Zumtobel team not long ago and as usual I quizzed them about getting their lights in Revit format. They promised to get in touch with the head office in Austria, and sure enought about 6 weeks later I go this link ZUMTOBEL LIGHT FAMILIES

They appear to be perfectly useable families too. Only a fraction of their full product range but if you check the dates, they haven't been doing this very long yet. Will be interesting to see how it develops.

Don't know if you noticed but we've been to NZ, US & Austria. So this is an interesting global network building up. David Light posted a link to more NZ content the other day. Plumbing Fittings what is more ! Not many decent Revit toilet families around yet, as I have mentioned before. Previous Post

Turns out there is a whole bunch of interesting content on this site. Well worth keeping a regular eye on. Seems to be a very pro-active Revit community down there in NZ. Product Spec NZ

I met Tim Bates from Newforma this week and it was interesting that he cited Content as one of the big issues in the BIM world at present, not just availability, but also standards setting and how to manage all that information as it grows. Let's face it there's going to be an enormous amount of stuff out there once Manufacturers really start pumping out there entire product line. Type catalogues are all very well, but there has to be a better way of selecting what you want from thousands of options and of keeping your content up to date too. Will Revit libraries get constant upgrade warnings when product ranges change ? At present I am downloading anything I can get my hands on and putting it into "Collections" files, just to make it accessible to my Revit users.

Lots of this is stuff we create ourselves of course, but a fair amount comes from the web, some of it tweaked to work better. Once we start getting really good stuff from the manufacturers though, either they go the Andersen plug-in type of route with automatic upgrades when new content arrives, or they have really good download sites. And these are rare. Usually you spend far too much time navigating backwards and forwards trying to understand what is available, then remembering the name of the range you want, and selecting CAD items to put in a cart, only to have to unzip them all at the other end and arrange them into folders so you can remember later on what those cryptic file names mean.

So I can't wait to see what the NBS guys come up with. We use the NBS on-line system for all our specifications and I just think it's so well written and presented. So I was excited to hear about the new National BIM Library that will come on line in November.

Winter of Revit Content indeed.

NBS BIM library

REFERENCE PLANE HEAVEN

2011-09-05T19:23:00.003+04:00

I came across the term "reference plane hell" in a forum a couple of years back and it's always stuck in my mind. Some guy who was probably used to the simplicity & freedom of Sketchup was struggling to do things the Revit way. Most of us have been through this frustration and many regular Revit users never quite figure out how to unleash the power of reference planes.

I decided to make a deck chair family the other day, and very quickly realised this is a classic reference plane situation. I started off by making a "typical member" which is a simple rectangular extrusion.

Four of these get put together to make one of the frames. So nest the "typical member" into a new family, set up your reference planes, place 4 members and constrain them. By associating the length of members with the Width & Length of the host family your frame becomes parametric and ready for nesting into the Deck Chair family itself.

This third family is where the reference planes really start working for a living. Go to a side elevation and draw angled planes. Give them names (important step)

Load a frame and place it on the work plane for the sloping back. User created workplanes only show up if you have given them names. This frame family is now locked into a relationship with that reference plane and will remain parallel to it. You can go into the front elevation and align it centre-to-centre. Lock it in place if you like. Nudge it up and down, it will simply slide along the plane. If you want it to move away from the plane you will need to specify an offset in the properties dialogue.

Go ahead and place the seat on it's own reference plane. The 2 struts and the rail are placed on the third work plane and have different breadth & depth parameters. This gives the illusion that the rail is rotated through 90 degrees. If you need to adjust the angles of the frames, just go into a side view and rotate the reference planes.

Once you understand the way reference planes work it's easy to control the geometry. But if you just place objects without linking them to planes, trying to rotate them in 3 dimensional space is very frustrating.

The rest is quite easy: an extrusion for the canvas, some material parameters and you have a perfectly acceptable deck chair to populate the pool decks of your resort projects.

Just to recap, the deck chair has two nested families, a strut and a frame. Each of these nested families has two types, with slightly differen sizes.

Struts are also nested inside the frame family, but I renamed the family as "member" and there is just one type, named "typical".

If you fight against Reference Planes, then life can be hell, but if you learn to work with them, and plan your families systematically, Reference Planes will actually give you greater freedom and control than the simplistic, push-pull methods of a programme like Sketchup. No offence to Sketchup, it's a great little app, but Revit can take you higher ... if you have the patience to learn its heavenly secrets.

FLEX THAT CUSHION

2011-09-05T18:50:00.001+04:00

I've said it before. Revit does not excel at making soft floppy things. It's number one job is to build rigid structural elements. The conceptual massing tools are great for creating organic forms that panellise into grid-shell assemblies. But they are not really intended for making cushions & pillows, despite my previous efforts. here

All this is fine, but we do like to populate our interiors with furniture that looks moderately convincing. Some of us have interior design projects that demand photo-realistic renders of interior schemes complete with all the soft furnishings we have so carefully selected.

So here's another small contribution. It's a fully parametric cushion family. All instance parameters so it's very easy to make new versions on the fly. Very simple to make and lots of potential to nest this in furniture families and significantly reduce the effort needed to make these.

Set up reference planes for Width & Length, create a rectangular extrusion, lock it to the planes & fillet radius the corners. Select each arc in turn and convert the temporary radius dimensions to permanent ones. Select these and label them "R1"

Make a new profile family. Add 2 reference planes with labelled dimensions. Draw to lines and an arc. The arc will automatically lock to a perfect quadrant as you get close to this shape. Load into your cushion family.

In a 3d view go to Home/Void/Sweep. Pick path, Pick 3D edges and pick your way around the top edge of the extrusion. Finish the path and select the profile. Choose the family you have just made. Zoom in to check it. You may have to flip the sweep.

Finish the sweep and you should have a nice rounded edge. Repeat this for the bottom of the cushion. The result is a family that flexes nicely to various shapes, from a box with slightly rounded edges, to a slighly flattened balloon. You can even take the top and bottom radii beyond half way to create a sharp crease around the middle.

The best pillows I've made so far are based on a rectangle without radius corners. Instead I put a slight kink in the sides. The result is still an abstraction, lacking the subtle irregularities of real life. But it is a native revit family, fully parametric, and recognisable as a pillow.
Renders quite nicely too

Final shot is from my furniture collection where all the GAJ reviteers can go shopping for what they need. Shows these cushion families nested into sofas and scattered about loose. I like the accidental effects on the round cushion (because you have to leave a short straight section for the family not to break)

Actually not the final shot, because I just discovered another happy accident. Because the cushions are work-plane based & not "always vertical" (go to family settings & parameters in family editor) they will host on each other. Even better because of the curved surfaces you can nudge the cushions around to fine tune the angles they rest at. Here's a shot from my bedroom furniture collection.

JOINT OWNERSHIP

2011-06-16T10:26:00.005+04:00

I am going to a cocktail party tonight, thanks to an invitation from a nice young lady called Mina.

She gave a CPD at GAj not long ago on behalf of Construction Specialties, a company who make clever stuff out of aluminium & flexible plastics ... including movement joints. As usual I asked my question about Revit content. Do they know what it is ? Are they interested in making it available ?

So the next weekend I prepared a little session for the Revit Lunch which demonstrated how to make a movement joint family and then broadened out into a discussion of keynoting and specifications. It's floor based and you can either physically cut through the whole slab or keep it in the finishes zone. There is a little extrusion that shows on the surface with a material parameter.

The details of the extrusions are detail components which only show up when you cut a section view. Plus you can set them to only show at fine scale. This helps with memory handling & regeneration times. You don't really want to see that level of detail at 1 in 50 for example. In the end I set the families to have 3 levels of complexity: Coarse Scale, Medium Scale & Fine Scale.

So hello Experts, let's start collaborating ! Like many companies in the field, CS make CAD downloads available, but I am yet to find an expansion joint manufacturer that offers Revit families, which is a shame.

Don't you realise that a Revit family has all this intelligence built in, like the name of the manufacturer, product code, link to their website, specifications code (CSI or NBS depending on how american or british you wish to be). Talk about a competitive edge ... time for someone to go out and grab it.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

2011-06-15T21:43:00.001+04:00

Two images here: one compiled a couple of years ago before the project went on site. Mental Ray renderings directly from Revit.

The second I put together today from recently taken site photos. Goes to show how accurate a picture we can give a client these days of the building they are going to get.

Acknowledgements to Ammar Berou (now with Atkins) for work done on the Revit model, to Michael Dawson for driving the project through to completion, and to Sandro for the excellent photos.

WIKI LUNCH

2011-06-15T21:02:00.005+04:00

So the Revit Lunch Wiki is up and running. Hoping for some contributions soon,

For the record the straw which led this camel to the water (what ?) was a video that I watched by Ken Young of HOK describing their use of Social Media,

HOK video at KA connect

One day I'll learn how to embed this video properly in my web page.

While I'm here might as well comment that I posted more historical stuff on my Chose to Sing the Blues site. Relates to my time in Zimbabwe and especially work I did in the education sector, both as a Curriculum Developer and later as an Architect. A lot of water under that bridge ... and while we're on that subject

here's a bunch of Zimbabweans moulding bricks. I took this photo about 25 years ago when the future was looking rosy there and my youngest son was not yet born.

SPOILT FOR CHOICE

2011-05-29T11:02:00.005+04:00

Too many options for what to do this weekend. Managed half a day playing with 123D one of the many freebies that Autodesk has tossed out recently.
Forgive my obsession with toilets, but I immediately started thinking ... could this little gadget help us make better plumbing families ?

So this is my first little model. The interface is quite interesting: little clusters of buttons around the cursor. Do they have touch screens in mind perhaps ? But once you start modelling there are familiar concepts like workplanes, view cube, sweeps & revolves.
You can access the same materials list as Revit, and these are quite impressive in real-time modelling mode. Note the highlights on the porcelain. This is not a rendered image.

Push-pull & rotate gizmos pop up when you need them along with little boxes to type in accurate dimensions and angles. By default the interface is very simple & clean, but stuff keeps popping up as you stumble around clicking everything in sight.

There are various options for backgrounds & visual effects. Some of it is obviously sketch-up like, some derived from other autodesk products (inventor, showcase). The reflective floor effect is quite sweet.

After a short struggle, I managed to figure out the built in animation. This has a lot of potential, but there doesn't seem to be any way to export it as yet. The model itself can be saved in several formats including SAT & DWG. The SAT comes into a Revit family quite nicely.

I did a quick trial I just using the 123D export for the WC Pan and modelling the seat in Revit so I could give it a material parameter. Seems to me that the realistic view style in Revit is not quite as good as 123D.

The seat is just an extrusion with a void sweep using the pick-edge option. To set the material for the WC pan, you need to go to object styles / imported objects. The geometry came in as layer 0, but I renamed it so that when I bring the family into a Revit file I can control different CAD import materials. The current convention I use is <underscore_material name> This groups together all the CAD layers set up by us, so it's easy to find them and assign materials.

So as a way of generating geometry that is difficult to make with the native Revit modelling tools (sanitary ware, furniture) I think 123D has potential. Will be interesting to see how it develops from here.

DRIVE MY CAR

2011-05-22T10:22:00.000+04:00

I'm about to buy a new laptop so 2012 hasn't got installed yet. No point in talking about the new features till I've used them so let's deal with what isn't there.
Every year we hope for better stairs & railings. Never mind. What else is high on the list ? Sketchup is obviously one of the elephants in the room. It's easy to convince people that Revit is a much more powerful programme than Sketchup, but much harder to seduce them away. You'll get answers like: the graphics are better, it's easier to learn, navigation is faster & more intuitive.
Clearly Autodesk are aware of the challenge & have various strategies in place.

New options in visual styles
Better tooltips & help for new users
New training videos
Conceptual massing environment
Project Vasari

But Sketchup also has lots of great content on the web. There is Revit content out there too of course, but it tends to look a bit clunky, as if it's been made by engineers & CAD managers (hint). We need better cars & furniture & trees to populate our models the way the sketchup guys can.
So here's my contribution.

It's a generic small family car that has something of a Sketchup feel to it. Not trying to be too realistic, just trying to catch the essence of a car the way you might do in a quick freehand drawing.

Based on an extrusion with 2 identical void sweeps

The extrusion is just a simplified side elevation profile

The void sweeps are a bit more tricky ... 3 arcs form the cutting edge of the profile with some straight lines to close the loop

The path is another 3 arcs. 2 of them meet at a slight angle to form the glazing line

Two material parameters. The glass is type based, not much need to change it. The car body is instance based - quickly choose a material colour for each car.

Add the wheels & that's it. I based this on a family I downloaded. Can't remember where from, my apologies. The source file has 2D information only. Shows up in orthographic views as a nicely detailed Yaris. I left this in there set my extrusions to only show in 3d views.
Hope you like it. I will be attempting more entourage families in a similar conceptual style, so stay tuned.

GREENHOUSE GAS

2011-04-04T22:25:00.003+04:00

Last post, I mentioned the Revit Lunch: Starter, Main Course, Dessert.

The pictures above come from one of my main courses. I was just playing around one weekend, trying to link parameters together so that simple changes in input might generate more complex results. I also wanted to practice using the ability of reference lines to control angular relationships better than reference planes can.

I came up with this little radial array of round columns. It's set up so that the taller you make the column, the thinner it gets.

To further simplify input. All the columns in an array are linked together to grow progressively taller. So for each array you only input 2 dimensions, a height & a radius.

Three of these were arranged concentrically. Then I built a conceptual mass surface based on reference lines snapped to the end points of the columns. And used curtain system by face to create a canopy.

There just 3 heights & 3 radii to play with, so it's quick to make changes that radically alter the form. It can look a bit like Stirling's History Library, all sloping one way. You can make it pitch up to a ridge in the middle, or down into a central valley.

Actually, I lied. There are 2 heights in each family: a base height & a variation height. If you make the base small and the variation large then you get a dramatic swoop around the curve. But if the base is big, and the variation small then the effect is much more subtle.

I called it the Green House Gas, because it's a bit like a Greenhouse, and all the materials are green, and I enjoyed making it.

LUNCH WITH THE GODS

2011-04-04T21:01:00.001+04:00

Earlier this year I started a thing called the "Revit Lunch" We have a resource area at GAJ where presentations & design reviews take place, which doubles up as a kind of canteen space.

My idea was to give weekly presentations aimed at intermediate level users who want to get deeper into family creation, or conceptual massing, or whatever. I break it down into Starter, Main Course & Dessert. Maybe start with a slide-show loop and finish with a video clip. One time we had Zach Kron's icing the donut clip for dessert, which seemed appropriate.

First main course was a gentle introduction to wall-hosted families. Cut openings versus void extrusions & sweeps. Locking geometry to reference planes. I dropped this image into the server library to remind people what we covered.

The weekend before lunch 03 I got inspired to model a Greek temple. Started out as "how to tackle the fluting on a doric column" Ended up as what used to be called the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, a Greek colony in Southern Italy.

I wanted the fluting to be based on a profile that could be scaled parametrically, but couldn't get this to work. Had to be content with manually scaling the sketches in family editor. It's a pretty fast way to make doric columns of different sizes & proportions. One day I'll have another go at making it all operate from 2 or 3 parameters in the family type dialogue.

This was just a quick weekend exercise, but it demonstrated to me once more the depth of insight that building a Revit model of something brings.

I think it should be a mandatory part of all History of Architecture courses. Work in groups, collect lots of reference images for the building, divide up the family creation work, assemble your model. Then each student gets to set up views, renderings, text & analysis on a single A1 sheet to convey the insight they gained into the chosen building.

If every school of Architecture around the world was doing this, and they posted all the results on open websites, think what a resource that would become. Kind of Great Buildings.com on steroids.

SNAKES & LADDERS

2011-04-04T19:55:00.000+04:00

So one of the April fools gags this year was about the Stairs & Railings tools that have once more failed to arrive with the new release of Revit. Everyone moans about Stairs & Railings and they can be a pain, but the more you use the existing tools the more you find you can achieve.

Over the christmas break I set myself a couple of staircase challenges. No 1 was the helical stair under the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Three images above are Realistic, Reference Photo & Rendered.

The railings are the key here. The round handrail is easy stuff, The glass is a continuous rail with joints formed by balusters that are just slivers of glass lying in the same plane. Gives the effect of a series of curved panels with very little effort. The triangular undercarriage of the stair is also created as a railing with a custom profile.

Final sheet is from our office server Revit library. I've created a "collections" folder with a file for each category of families, and I just drop in there whatever I make or find so people can copy/paste whatever they find useful. It's a lot more user-friendly than browsing through folders opening & closing families till you find the one you want. I also means I can set up explanatory sheets like the one above, or maybe a sheet on office standard naming conventions.

Flushed with success I went on to tackle and open-tread steel staircase which also uses more than one railing. The brackets are balusters in a baluster-per-tread railing which is separate from the "real" railing. The steel channel stringers are part of this second railing. Used a custom nosing for the open treads and that was it. Will get round to rendering this one day.

In conclusion though, better stairs & railings are still high up on my wish-list. Next year maybe ...

PILLOW TALK

2011-03-27T22:43:00.000+04:00

If only ...

How often does Revit get me saying that ? Its such a brilliant way of working, you can't help wanting to do more, to do everything the Revit way. So if only. If only we could use the conceptual massing tools to make furniture, or sanitary fittings, or pillows for example.

So how would I set about it ? Could start with a profile, model lines drawn in a generic model family. Something like this.

Bring this into a massing family and place several instance of different sizes on reference places. Use these to make a form. Not a bad approximation to a pillow.

Using linked instance parameters, we can vary the shape, scale it up and down, even swap in different profiles. An elipse for example. Some simple formulas will allow us to keep user parameters down to a minimum

Small versions could be pillows, cushions, various household items.

Larger versions can be panellised to make buildings, perhaps an arena ...

or maybe a flying saucer or two. All variations on the same basic family. Just tweaking the instance parameters will scale it up or down by a factor of 10 or 100, convert a rectangle into an ellipse, squeeze out a flange in the middle ...

Not too hard to imagine making better sanitary fittings this way. In fact it turns out that you can do the same kind of form making with generic model profiles in an adaptive family. Now adaptive families can be plumbing fixtures, and they can be shared, so by hosting them in a mass you can get them into a project and schedule them. I made a version of Duravit's Puravida WC this way using a D shaped profile with 3 instance parameters to create 4 different forms, 2 for the bowl and 1 each for the seat & the cistern. Loaded in a standard family that I use for flush buttons and the result is a better WC than I have been able to make before using native Revit modelling tools.

With Revit 2012 offering direct placement of adaptive components it will be no longer necessary to host my WC in a mass. Now this is probably not what the factory had in mind for adaptive components, but it's about time we had some decent sanitary ware, so why not ?

A SCREEN FOR ALL SEASONS

2010-12-23T13:58:00.000+04:00

Musharabiya screens are popular design elements in the Gulf Region. Everyone loves them. They look good, they come in all shapes & sizes, they are functionally justified and environmentally friendly. But how best to make them in Revit ?

Its easy enough to make a fixed size screen or to take a fixed module and use it in a parametric array. But in practice the sizes you need are probably not so well behaved. Currently we have a project in Oman that uses screens with sizes like 2930x1150 and 3120x1230. I need to make these using a regular pattern module of say 600x600.

Early attempts used extrusions for the panels and voids to trim the edges down to size, but they were never flexible enough to cover all sizes & the panels tended to distort at the edges. So last weekend I tried again with much better results.

The key ideas were:

use sweeps for the panels
define the patterns with loaded profiles
control the void using reference lines, not planes

Advantages include:

sweeps don't distort
it's easy to load a new profile with a different pattern
reference planes tend to push the panels around when flexed, reference lines don't.

Screenshots & notes below describe how the family works.

3 versions of the family using different profiles (patterns) Workplane based can be horizontal or vertical. Size variable up to 1800x4800. Material by subcategory and/or parameter. Rectangular frame with width & depth parameters.

24 panels controled by the same profile family in 8 rows of 3 define the maximum size. Smaller sizes are created by a void extrusion. Reference lines control the void cut and host the path for the sweep that forms the frame.

2 of the profile families

One final trick. By duplicating one of the elevation views I create a place to display text notes to guide future users of the family. For those at GAJ, I will put the family on the server.

POST NO 1

2010-10-20T14:45:00.000+04:00

So here it is. A public space for the Revit team at Godwin Austen Johnson. A place where I can share my thoughts with co-workers and anyone else who takes an interest.

I'll keep this one very simple.

Most of us are now using the ribbon interface (Revit 2011). Various customisations are possible, but let's try to set an office standard. I recommend docking the properties dialogue on the right and leaving the browser docked on the left.

You can also right-click on any command to add it to the quick access toolbar at the top of the screen.

My quick access toolbar now looks like this:

That's all for post no 1