WINDOW HACKING

Nice post from Philip Chan on his new blog  HERE  This has created a good deal of interest.  Hard coded behaviours are great most of the time, but annoying when it's not what you want.

A couple of years ago I developed my own little hack which in a way is the reverse of Philip's.

I was making elaborate archways for a project we were doing in Egypt.  The client wanted a lot of variety in the facade, generally with an arabic flavour.  We had a dozen or so "typical bays" which were scattered around in different combinations over a series of apartment blocks.  I needed to embed some detail components into the families so that they would look the part in section views.

In some cases this was just a matter of indicating continuous external render where the original wall was cut away or built up.

Some of the bays had windows nested in them, some were just archways with balconies behind.  I didn't want to use the windows category for the master family because I was worried about double tagging.  Also archways might find their way into the window schedule if someone forgot to filter them out.  The problem I faced was that the detail items sometimes showed up in inappropriate places.

With a window family this is easily solved by checking the "only show when cut" box.  In a generic model family this feature is greyed out.

You will have already guessed my solution.  Swap the type to window, check the box, swap back again to GM.  It stays checked even though it's greyed out.  Why they don't just let us check the box in a Generic Model family I don't know.

Just a variation on Philip's hack.  (Hi Philip)  Hope you find it useful.

MASTER BLASTER

This is a follow up to the previous post.  You can get a Generic Model Adaptive family to take mass floors by embedding it within a Mass family.  So what ?  Why might you want to use adaptive features while doing a GFA study for a project ?  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about that one (really need to get a life) and started scribbling down ideas.

Divide and repeat springs to mind straight away.  What if you were to make a podium with a variable number of towers for example.  The image below shows my first test.  2 instances of the same family.  The same nested GMA family serves for both the base and the towers (two types)

The towers are hosted on a repeater which is hosted on the base.  The whole thing takes mass floors nicely.

Lots of instance parameters to play with for different configurations.  You can see how this would be useful in a masterplanning context.

Our weekend is about to start, so apart from completing a mammoth post on Ronchamp and putting my Revit file up for download, I might play around with this idea a little more.  Maybe try some less regular shapes, curved arrays, dancing towers ...

But before I sign off, another little nod in Luke Johnson's direction.  Just after I made the multi-tower family a little light bulb went on.  Didn't he do something a bit similar ?  Actually it wasn't quite the same because he wasn't using mass floors, just making curved rows of townhouses, but it is a variation on a similar theme.  Take a look.

LUKE: using-divide-and-repeat-for-site

MASS MURDER

I feel like Luke Johnson.  2 short posts in the same day .... :)

Question from Stefan: why are mass floors greyed out when a generic model adaptive family is loaded ?  I had to check this one out quickly.  It seems to me that there are subtle differences at work.

We have lots of family templates available and many slight differences in the way they work.  In this case we are looking at just 3 of them:

• Generic Model
• Generic Model Adaptive
• Conceptual Mass

Now the first 2 partake in some of the nature of the third (a full-Monty Mass family), but not all.  They can take wall-by-face, roof-by-face etc.  But they won't create mass floors.  Mass floors are a subcategory of "Mass".  So it would be rather odd if they existed within another category.  How would you hide them, or assign materials to them ?  

In my quick experiment I made three cylinders, one from each of the templates mentioned above.  All of them accept hosted system families (walls, roofs, curtain systems)  BUT ... only the Mass can utilise the automatic Mass Floors by level feature.  The tool appears on the ribbon, as if to let you know that this is something half-way to being a mass, but it's greyed out.  You can't actually use it.

You can see where the confusion arises.  Generic models seem to behave like Mass families, but only up to a point.  With Generic Model Adaptive it's even more "understandable" because you are actually working in the Conceptual Massing Environment when making this type of family, rather than conventional family editor.  So you might expect Mass behaviour.  But apparently this does not extend to mass floors.

I stand to be corrected, but I think that's how it is.  So to Stefan: you need to start from the Conceptual Mass template if you want to use mass floors. 

But what if you want to use adaptive points & repeaters and all that clever stuff ?  Well it seems that if you nest a Generic Model within a Mass then it will take mass floors.  So all your hard work is not lost, just start a new Mass family, load your GMA into it and then load the Mass into your project.  

Hope this helps and I am open to correction from the likes of Kelvin & Alfredo who may well have gone into this in more depth.