WILL IT SCALE?

 

Blog posts from early 2013

This was an exciting period for me.  I visited New Zealand for Revit Technology Conference, to stay with my sister in Auckland and to see something of that unique country.  Alfredo Medina came up to me at the RTC social, introducing himself and sparking a lifelong friendship.  I sat in on a couple of Marcello sessions, heckling him on the difference between Doric & Tuscan, but feeling totally inspired and motivated.  His scalable Tuscan column (based on a spline) got me going.  I was aware of basic spline behaviour (two ways of stretching the end point by using the TAB key) but I had never thought of using it to scale a profile, or a revolve sketch.  This was rather early in my journey into classical architecture and long before Project Soane took a hold on my life.

I stand by my conclusion at the time.  You can do classical architecture well, and you can do it REALLY BADLY.  Take the time to study and learn.  It is a very deep well of tradition.  If you are not to put in the hard yards, just leave it alone. 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spline-sailing.html

The glass onion arose from a challenge that cropped up at work.  It’s a good example of using “pick 3d edge” to create complex curves using the traditional family editor.  Probably I should go back to this and see if I can make it more fully parametric.  The last part is also interesting.  Using the rectangular rig to make parametric domes … a family of onion species with different proportions.  I think I should revisit this whole area.  

St Basil’s cathedral, Moscow … anyone?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-glass-onions.html

 

And back to the Tuscan Column theme.  This is not my current approach to capturing the fundamental variety that is available using the Classical language, but it was an important step along that road. 

I really must get back to my column collection, and get it into shape for sharing, at least with a limited audience.  The whole range of Classical elements within Revit should be an established open source project.  Paul Aubin’s book was a huge contribution of course, but I think we could do a better job of extending this, developing robust content and sharing it widely.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/tuscan-rig.html

 

 

I think “Flat People” are still useful.  Photoreal is great … but not always.  Sometimes you want a more stylised, line-art approach to the graphic presentation of an idea.  Early concept design for example.  You might not want to mislead the client into thinking your design ideas are more fully developed than they actually are. 

This is my second post on the topic and I had a couple of people share their collections, so I created some more, as I had promised. 

“One thing that experienced users with a public presence can do is to create better content and make it freely available.”  Here, here! I’m still in favour of that.

And another quote from the end.  I’ve been saying this for a long time now.

“we should also strive to treat Revit like a pencil.  Just pick it up, let it become one with your hand, eye & brain, thinking about the vision you are trying to capture.  Let the tools become transparent.  Create.”

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/more-pancake-people.html

 

This is another “revisit”.  Spiky geometry that is easier to make in Sketchup than in Revit BUT tends to lose it’s ability to translate into a solid.  Mesh objects won’t support the “mass floors” feature which is so useful in Revit based early design.  I haven’t used Formit for some time, so I’m not sure if the conversion is more predictable or easier to handle using that route.  Another thing to get back to.

Maybe most people would use Dynamo and direct shape geometry these days.  Will have to talk to Daniel about that.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spikey-stuff.html

 

 

It seems like almost every post from this time-frame is something I want to explore further.  This is a variation of the rectangular grid.  This time a circular rig with radial spokes.  There is an exchange with Paul Aubin in the comments.  He has a very elegant method for modelling volutes in his book.  Currently my volutes are very abstracted and low-res.  Perhaps I could combine this rig with Paul’s approach to create a parametric volute generator.  Once again, maybe dynamo would do a better job.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spiral-rigging.html

 

MORE PANCAKE PEOPLE

I came across the comment below yesterday on Mark Cronin's blog   It seemed quite appropriate.  It's easy to get carried away with being "clever" & pushing the boundaries. but ultimately the success of BIM hinges on what hundreds of thousands of ordinary guys & gals can do with it out there in the construction industry.

One thing that experienced users with a public presence can do is to create better content and make it freely available.  So in this spirit, I return to the world of entourage.  If you go to my post FLAT PEOPLE & scroll down to the end, you will see that I promised to make another 15 ... IF 2 of my readers made a collection of their own available.  Exactly 2 generous souls responded to this challenge.  You can find their links under comments, and expand your entourage options with two excellent downloads.

I set about making my next batch by asking a colleague to export some sketchup people to CAD, as pickable outlines.  This kind of worked, but sadly "TAB-pick" failed.  I was faced with a rather tedious session of mouse clicking.  I could have just thrown sketchup files into Revit families, but this makes the changing of materials a bit more cumbersome and sometimes impossible.  Better quality Pancake People means native Revit geometry, so I manned up and set myself to picking.

Every cloud has a silver lining.  You have to think of something while doing a repetitive task, and I found myself reflecting on what makes for a good Entourage object.  It was obvious that different people had been involved in the original tracing exercise.  It may seem strange to talk about style & panache when referring to tracing an outline using a mouse to create short line segments, but as I proceeded, I found myself looking for figures that had been traced with a certain freedom & economy of means.  It's more effective to vary the line length and sometimes to exaggerate the changes in direction slightly to emphasise folds in cloth (for example).

Also I prefer to have my people standing firmly on the ground.  Some of the figures out there look fine in perspective view, but pretty stupid in elevation.  Perhaps this is because Sketchup doesn't feature true orthographic (one of the reasons it's not really BIM)  Then I get to thinking, "why are we taking this cardboard modelling software as the standard to aim for when it comes to people & trees & furniture ?"   There is a reason.   It's much easier to find good looking objects of these categories if you live in Skup-World.  But that doesn't mean we have to copy mindlessly.  Rise to the challenge & think about what you are doing.

Soon enough I had my first 9 persons.  Then I realised I was seriously short of Arabic people.  Time to exit Skup-Copy mode and trace directly from images.  This was another eye-opener.  If you grew up drawing freehand, as I did, you know that when it comes to people, it's all in  the hands & faces.  Mindlessly tracing hands & faces from photographs is a recipe for disaster.  You have to have some experience, and you need to stop and look at the end product and make some critical adjustments based on what your eyes tell you.  This is where the shape arrows on a Revit extrusion come in really handy.  You can make tiny adjustments to the lips & nose working directly on the extrusion.  Tweak, assess, tweak, assess.  Am I being silly ?  It's only a stylised person to throw around your project to give scale.  Oh really ?  Not to me.  We design by creating images that catch the vision that is in our imagination.  Stylisation & abstraction are thousands of years old.  For most people the effect may be subconscious, but we live in a world of visual imagery, and small details count.

Anyway I went on to create 6 entourage objects based on people wearing the national dress of the Gulf Region where I live & work.  I'm not claiming them as great works of art, but I was focussing on the kind of issues I would have been thinking about if I had been drawing with a pencil.  This brings me to my final point.  It's useful to think about tips & tricks for Revit and it's good to extend the art of the possible BUT we should also strive to treat Revit like a pencil.  Just pick it up, let it become one with your hand, eye & brain, thinking about the vision you are trying to capture.  Let the tools become transparent.  Create.

NEW COLLECTION

Oh & if anyone else wants to contribute ... that would be nice!

FLAT PEOPLE

At GAJ we are in the process of pushing the use of BIM back into concept design stage.  If you were to break our BIM journey down into phases, it might go like this.
Phase 1 = fighting to establish a core group of users.
Phase 2 = broadening the base.
Phase 3 = confirming BIM as the dominant process for documentation.
Phase 4 = what we are doing now, ie proving that BIM can be used earlier on in the design process.

Each phase has involved improvements to our content library.  So what do you want from a family that is optimised for early design work ?  It should look good.  It should be simple & flexible, user-friendly, etc etc.  This post is about entourage.  You can use the out-of-the-box RPC people if you like, but maybe you would prefer something more abstract.

This is not a new idea.  "Flat People" are common in the skp world that so many early-bird designers inhabit.  It's not very hard to create this kind of content in Revit, especially if you have an existing library of CAD persons.  You are looking to create a very thin extrusion.

You can drag CAD blocks into family editor and they will then exist in 3d space.  If you set the work plane to a vertical surface (or reference plane) they will stand up nicely for you.  If you are lucky, you can tab-select around the edge in a single click.  Sadly CAD people were rarely drawn so meticulously, meaning a bit more effort to pick lines & trim the joins.

One accidental spin-off for me was the realisation that I could leave the CAD file in there and add a visibility control (as an instance parameter perhaps ?).  You could also set it to be only visible at fine scale.

I spent an afternoon making 15 of these families recently.  Maybe 10 minutes each.  And once you have them, the whole office can benefit.  In fact if another 10 Revit addicts were to follow my lead and contribute half a day to the common pool, we could give the whole world a very valuable resource.

So in that spirit, you can download my little collection of Flat People from HERE

flat people.zip

And I will follow up with a promise.  If 2 more people do the same and point me to a download that they are willing to share with the whole world (or at least everyone who reads my blog) I will spend another afternoon creating 15 more flat people and upload them for free download.

Any volunteers ?