CURTAINS FOR AARHUS

I don't know much about Aarhus.  Didn't know anything until it was announced as the next venue at the conclusion of RTC Europe in Porto.  I won some free accommodation in a not-very-serious quiz at the end of the Building Content Summit (if they remember) which has enticed me into submitting a couple of abstracts.  More to the point, I really enjoyed the atmosphere at my first European version of the event and made some good friends.  No longer RTC of course, this will be the first BiLT Europe, rebranding to reflect a broadening audience, with a somewhat improved logo.

Arhus means "River Mouth" apparently and the town has Viking origins. Turns out to be Denmark's second largest city, with Scandinavia's largest University and a massive container port. I'm looking forward to drinking in some Scandinavian atmosphere, assuming it works out.  Perhaps I will manage a day or two in Copenhagen also, some buildings there I would love to see.  And of course every culture has its own quirks in terms of building techniques and styles: the way these have been expressed over the years.  Always inspiring to visit a new city with a few hundred years of cultural history behind it.

Conferences give me a motivation to explore something more thoroughly and in more depth than I might otherwise do, and I usually try to do something significantly different each time. Over the past year or so I have had some interesting challenges using Revit's Curtain Wall tool, and I realise that I would like to undertake a more systematic review of its capabilities and quirks.

Overlaying an element of randomness onto a regular grid is a simple but effective architectural maneuver, with obvious relevance to the Curtain Wall tool.  I've really enjoyed trying out different approaches to this, and look forward to sharing my experiences.  Nothing fancy, just basic Family Editor stuff with a sprinkling of lateral thinking. 

Revisiting a project to prepare a presentation usually throws up new ideas. 
You wouldn't expect to use curtain walls on Project Soane, but there are many internal areas where he used a finish that imitates stone courses with recessed joints, so I've been experimenting with curtain panels that mimic various tiling patterns.  Fill patterns with matching render appearances are all very well, but sometimes you want to express the 3 dimensionality of the joints in shaded views.

I've had several goes at the Mushrabiya Screen in the past, with varying degrees of success.  Last week I put a couple of ideas together with a slightly different twist.  The result is a very flexible modular system for generating new scalable patterns, rapidly and reliably. It's my best attempt so far, and subject to further development over the next few months.

I worked on a project last year which is just coming back to life again.  Not going to reveal any specific details, but it involves insulated panel walls that slope and curve.  All this is half-hidden behind a slatted screen which is not yet modelled, our scope is the interior fit-out, so I've been modelling someone else's design as context for ours.  It was an interesting challenge and I'll be sharing my solution for what it's worth.  Something of a hybrid, but it does the job.

I've also been giving some support to teams doing concept designs for residential developments.  My contribution has mostly been to develop families that facilitate rapid mocking-up of external façade ideas.  One of the techniques I am playing with involves using the curtain wall tool to model both structural frame and infill treatments.  It shows some potential, at early concept stage, when things are still very fluid. 

I've also done some work, at the request of another colleague, on ways to model junctions of mullions with shaped sections that give better close-up results than the
default "square cut-off".  Again, it's early days and I will be exploring this further before venturing towards the land of the Vikings.

And to conclude this post, I have also been exploring the use of curtain walls to represent timber panelling.  Not so sure about this one.  I think it will only really pay off where there is a lot of regularity and repetition.  Shaping and cutting around doorways, windows, fireplaces etc. is a bit of a nightmare.  Still it's an interesting challenge to stretch the capabilities of the tool.

My second abstract also involves an in-depth study of a particular Revit category: Planting.  But that will be another post.

SAY CHEESE

Smile.  Some quick images following on from yesterday.

The topic is curtain panels that scale automatically.  The restrictions are you have to keep to the original proportions and the curtain wall must be a whole number of panels in both directions.

The advantages are : changing sizes on the fly even with complex geometry.  Take the following "swiss cheese" example.

You could make this without the double-nested planting families.  And you could edit the extrusion sketch manually, scale it down, save as a different name, reload into project.  It would only take a few minutes, but it's a less fluent way of working.  I'm backing the double-nested technique for situations where you want to play around with the size on the fly, experiment with design ideas quickly.

The next one is similar.

 
I guess you could even make this one parametric, but it would hardly be worth the effort.  Double-nesting is easy once you've set up the first panel and linked up the parameters the way you want them.  This is more of a tool for designers than documenters IMHO.

The speed advantage becomes much greater once you progress beyond a single extrusion.  The next example would be a real pain to resize multiple times by conventional methods.

Using double-nesting I created all three examples from scratch, including rendering and image processing in a couple of hours last night.  I only set up 3 different sizes for each panel design, because that's what I reckoned would show up clearly in a single image.  I could easily have created 10 different sizes for each though in a matter of minutes.

I have more on this.  Some egg & dart mouldings for Paul to salivate over :-) but that will have to be on Sunday.  Right now it's way past home time on a thursday afternoon, it being Ramadan and all.  So time to hit the weekend here in the Gulf.  Enjoy the cheesy designs everyone.

SCREEN PLANTING

Lots of people to credit here, but I'll point the finger at my good friend David Light and this recent post.      EMPIRE BIM

Each to his own, and as it happens I'm not particularly addicted to Star Wars. Maybe it's a generational thing.  But if you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I do have a thing for Musharabiya screens.

Make a new family, starting from a "Planting" template.  Go to the front elevation, use reference planes to mark out a square.  Mine is 1m x 1m. Make an extrusion within this square.  I started with something pretty boring, impatient to see results.  Nest this into another planting family & position at the origin (centre).

Nest the host planting family into a curtain panel family.  Again place at the centre.  Place a height dimension and make it a reporting parameter.  Mine reported 4m.  In type properties, set the height of the planting family to match this measurement.  It will scale, as all good double-nested planting families do.

Load into a project and make a curtain wall type with square panels and no mullions.  You need to size the wall so that there are no part panels at the edges.  I used an 800x800 panel and made the wall exactly 4 modules high by 7 modules long.

Set the panel type for this CW family to the panel family you have just made. Bingo.

Now try halving the module.  Just change the height & width parameters in the curtain wall definition.  All the panels resize like a charm.

Once you get the idea, it is easy to do some recursion.  Select a panel and unpin it.  Use the type selector to replace the panel with a wall type.  Choose a curtain wall with half the module size.  One panel becomes four.  Repeat this procedure to make ever smaller cells.

One of the drawbacks of this kind of blanket scaling is now revealed.  The panels get thinner.  We are back to CAD-style dumb scaling.  The whole idea of parametric modelling was that you had separate control over different aspects of a component.  Change the size of a door without scaling down the door frame or ending up with a non-standard thickness for the door leaf.  In our enthusiasm for clever new tricks we tend to forget these fundamentals.

So what if I wanted all the panels to have the same thickness ?  There is a way, and it's not too hard.  Go back to your original "nested planting" family.  Add a thickness parameter to control the thickness of the extrusion.  Define that thickness as "Height / Thickness Ratio".  Load back into the "host planting" family.

Link the "Thickness Ratio" parameter of "nested planting" to a matching parameter in "host planting".  Load into the curtain panel.  Link parameters again.  Now you can create different types with different "Thickness Ratios"   Basically if you know that the panels is half the size, just halve the thickness factor and the thickness will match the larger panel.

You can achieve subtle variations of thickness now, it is no longer totally dependent on panel height.

I went on to make a few more panels.  This is very easy once you've set everything up.  Just change the name, edit the original extrusion, load back, load back, load back.  Set a curtain wall to use the new panel.

This is the fastest method I have yet found for making a variety of screen designs with a module size that is easily adjusted.

One big drawback though.  You can only have whole panels.  No cutting and shaping at the edges.  Forget it.  Best I can think of is to make all the cut panels separately as Generic Models and place them one by one.  If there are part panels in a horizontal row, Revit will give you baby panels centred, with gaps between, as in the image below.

So it's an interesting technique but time alone will tell whether it will be useful on real projects.  Maybe for early studies where you are experimenting with module sizes.  Then once the module is fixed make families similar to the ones in my second ever post

HERE.

We are still using these.  Done solid service on several projects.  But changing the module size is a bit of a pain. Not too bad, but can't be done in a matter of seconds like you can with the planting version.  So once again, the best method for early design may not be the best method for construction documents.  No surprise there.  Always been the case.  6B pencil versus 4H.  Work smart, be flexible.