PUMPKIN POSTSCRIPT

So what have I learnt ?

 A lot ... never imagined where this jounrney would take me.  But let's stand back and reflect.  The basic premise of this exercise has been that pumpkins and doric columns can be treated as homologous structures.

METAMORPHOSIS
This is the essence of parametric families.  I could easily now make a family that has 2 types: a pumpkin and a doric column

Not something I would use directly, but I suspect that the techniques developed here will have many applications. Plumbing & furniture families that can morph into different sizes and shapes perhaps. 

SIMPLICITY (BOILING DOWN THE PUMPKIN)
I tried hard to simplify and organise my dialogue boxes, but I think they would still be pretty scary to the average user.  What should the Type Parameters Dialogue for a Doric Column family look like in an ideal world ?

BIOMIMICRY
Revit is good at making shapes based on rules.  But we also need to deal with the other end of the spectrum : soft, lumpy, irregular things.  You can use an FBX workflow into Max.  You can fake stuff in photoshop.  But you can also introduce some irregularity of shape & texture in Revit.  There is a long way to go though.  Think thatched roofing, & rough stone walling.  Not easy to do convincingly in Revit.

FILES
So it's been a long week and here in the desert our weekend started 5 hours ago.  Time to upload what I have and leave the rest to Zach.  File is  HERE .   2012 version this time.  Contents pictured below.

INTO THE VOID

Post 5 for the Pumpkin Competition.  Need to start carving.

To hollow out the middle we could use a revolve.  Conceptual massing doesn't have a separate revolve tool, just draw an axis line and a closed loop like you would with the normal revolve tool, and "make void form".

So how about the eyes ?  Make a triangular profile that is resizeable in a separate mass family.  Load into project. Draw lines radiating out from the centre of the pumpkin, add angle parameters. Host a point on those lines, make reference plane visible, place triangle on plane.  Selec line & triangle, make void, Revit knows it's a sweep.

Let's pause here.  Is anyone else getting worried ?  It's all getting too messy.  How am I going to link all this together so it resizes as a unit ?  What does it equate to in the real world ?  Let's back up a bit and try something a bit simpler. 

Imagine we want a hollow Doric column (precast or GRP maybe)  All we need is another set of profiles, scaled down by a factor and used to define a void. Probably we want a smooth circular void. We already have a circle profile in this family, so it's easy to create another 3 types and link their radii to the outer profiles.  This is nice, because we only have one more parameter for the end user to worry about.  I called this "Void factor" and set it to 0.8    Inner Radius = Outer Radius x Void Factor

The result is still quite robust and versatile.   I spent a little time on the dialogue box organisation & parameter naming. I've made an effort to arrange things logically and think about ease-of-use, but probably it could be distilled down further.

Need to be careful with the convex "pumpkin" versions because the shell can get too thin and the family breaks.  Maybe we could find a way of linking the bulge factor & void factor together to avoid this.  Clearly the re-entrant forms are going to be difficult, but there is potential here.

There's been a dynamic going between organic & geometric, make-it-look-like-a-pumpkin v do something useful & interesting, one off originality v the common good.  And if I really wanted to make a pumpkin that is convincingly real, re-sizeable, with optional carved voids, I'm probably more than half-way there. 

But the offshoots and by-products are too rich to ignore.  So I let myself get carried away for a while. . There is a treasure-trove of semi-automated form finding on my doorstep now,  with copious references to flowers, jellyfish, starfish, lemon-squeezers ...    I'm also well on the way to a whole battery of classical column families.

Perhaps this whole exercise with its flip-flopping between pumpkins & columns is an apt metaphor for architecting in general.  Oscillating back and forth between what we would like & what we can afford. 

MUSHROOMS & MICE

Post 4 of our Pumpkin Competition.

This one is just a series of random doodles.  What else can I do with profiles ?  How do I make a more realistic stem ?  Hey that looks like a mushroom ! 

Place 5 points on a vertical plane. Make a spline-by-points Set their work planes to always show. Host the 5 profiles on these planes.  (took a bit of coaxing)  Play with different radii and move the points about manually (push-pull)  Make the top two points adaptive (shape handle) 

Now I can take it into the project and fiddle with how the top of the stem curls over.  All a bit sluggish (delayed response), but quite interesting.  I've reverted to using 2011 so that the downloads will be more accessible.  This means the adaptive component has to be placed in an in-place mass family, not directly in the project.  No big deal.

Oops, now Florence is back, and the cat too.  Looks like a stage set with a painted backdrop, it's a problem we often face with RPC content: wonderful clever stuff, but watch out for the 2 dimensional give-aways.  Still, it gives me a chance to show off a bit in photoshop.  who wants a totally photo-real world anyway ?  And there's carving too, not parametric yet, but real pumpkin-face carving.  I love the way that Alice & Florence both seem to be staring at the Cheshire cat.  Maybe there are mice hiding in the pumpkin.  Something's making kitty's eyes light up.  It's also quite neat how the water-colour effect makes the two RPC trees blend with the background image.

OK, so I've added the mice, and it's all getting a bit silly.  But the point is that sometimes these "random accidents" can point to serious possibilities.  We are always playing in the space between image and reality, 3 dimensional experience & 2 dimensional diagram.  It's largely a question of how you navigate back & forth between these different worlds.  And suddenly I'm reminded of the most prosaic example.  Bannister Fletcher's page on the Doric Order.

Once again it's the juxtaposition of different scales and modes of drawing in order to compress a complex information set into a single image.  For sure BIM is changing our world, and we have to open our minds to new possibilities, possibly the demise of the "construction drawing" as we know it, but let's also remain alert to unexpected parallels and lessons from the past.