DRIVE MY CAR

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

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

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.