SNAKES & LADDERS

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

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

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:

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

Advantages include:

1.  sweeps don't distort
2.  it's easy to load a new profile with a different pattern
3.  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.