FLEX THAT CUSHION

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

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

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.