FIRST DIVISION

Divide & Repeat is a new  Revit 2013 feature in the Conceptual Design Environment.  I got around to trying this one out last weekend.  Most of what I did could have been handled using a divided surface and nesting components into a curtain panel by pattern, but the new method is more direct and easier to use. 

You can draw a circle, divide it, and control the number of nodes with a parameter.  Add a radius parameter.  Then repeat on a second level.

Attach a simple adaptive component to two of the points and press the Repeat button.  You got a ring of columns.  On top of the columns I built a variable dome made from three circles whose sizes can be independently varied. The middle circle is centred between the other two as the height is varied. Allows for all kinds of shapes from onions to gherkins.

The adpative column uses a circular mass profile.  New mass family.  Draw a circle, turn the radius into a real dimension, label it, load it into another mass.  Now it's available as a profile to make things out of and it's easily locked in place. 

Couldn't resist playing with the new visual styles features.  Realistic view with sky background & RPC content.  Thanks to Luke for pointing out that you can see the sun if you look in the right direction.  I had this eerie feeling that I was in a Rupert Bear world from 1960 ... something about the colours I think.

If you connect more than one object to your arrays of nodes, Revit will try to interpret this as the beginning of a pattern.  So when you press the repeat button be prepared for surprise effects as the programme tries to read your mind.  But meanwhile I was busy doing a couple of roof-by-face experiments.

Wasn't too hard to get a series of triangles going, and suddenly I was in 1960 again, but this time at the Rome Olympics where Mr Nervi did his thing and produced what we all thought were incredibly free-form organic structures at the time. 

As I was doing this I had just done my exploration of Parts, and was considering calling it "a man of many parts" ... hence the quote attached to a completely irrelevant image of a chinese hat roof made of clay tiles.

Interlude where I played with images and refreshed my memory of the works of Pier Luigi Nervi.  Lots of Sport & Bridges with the odd church thrown in for good luck.

So after a bit more playing with my bulging columns I decided to try making a Y shaped support a la Palazzetto dello Sport.  Has to be adaptive of course, based on 3 points.  I linked them together in a rig, with a triangle to form a plane and a parameter to vary the position of the fork. 

Loading this in as lines and repeating it everything was fine.

So I fleshed it out with more circular profiles hosted on points.  Hosted the circles while the points were away from the end, then pushed them out to the end using the normalised curve parameter.

So I had a highly parametric family, (roughly analogous to Nervi's dome on Y supports) which could be used to explore variations in the number of supports, curvature of the dome, etc.  In short an "early design tool"

Once you've made one, further iterations become progressively easier.  Triangular supports for example, and divided surface domes.  I ran out of time at this point, having barely scratched the surface.  There is the beginnings of a kit of parts here that could be fitted together & reused in all kinds of ways. 

Had to end with another "realistic" shot, complete with Dwayne at his usual moody best.  Rupert seems to have sneaked back in as well, and check out the free entourage I downloaded from a link that Luke Johnson shared (see post)  One of the ladies is looking mighty suspiciously at Dwayne ... but really, can you blame her ?

MORE PUNISHMENT

Second day of punishment on AutoCAD, I tried my luck with urinals.  Now there are some truly horrendous native revit families out there in this genre.















OK so one of these is a mesh made in some other programme.  There are some urinal families that look half decent ... but if it's native revit, chances are that the corners with be sharp.

Hence my experiments with AutoCAD solid modelling.  It's not that the shapes themselves are very demanding.  It's mostly a question of rounding off the corners nice & smoothly so they render convincingly. 

This images was a product of my second day of torture, trying to roll back the clock on my autoCAD skills.  I lost a bunch of work because I forgot that you can lose the ability to Redo just by changing your view angle.  This doesn't happen in Revit of course. 

To make a rig for Autocad, I converted my symbolic views into model lines and exported to CAD.
I tried some fairly elaborate lofting, but the resulting curves were too complex for the corner rounding to work.  Another dead end.

The final solution was to make a revolve based on half an elipse.  Then I cut this with a couple of extrusions.  Corner rounding worked fine, so I'm happy.

Now there's lots of stuff you can model directly in Revit, but it's good to be able to spot those shapes where you need a different modelling approach.  Right now I've got 3 approaches: Standard Revit, Conceptual Massing & Autocad solid modelling.  Each has it's strengths & weaknesses. 

What we need now is to pool our resources & create a decent set of "free download" plumbing fittings.  (step 1) and keep up the pressure on the sanitaryware manufacturers & suppliers to upgrade their BIM content (step 2)

MY WEEKEND ON THE TOILET

It's shocking to think that I spent over a decade putting in at least 20 hours a week on Acad, and now everytime I open the programme up it feels like punishment.  Part of this is fading memory, part is the different habits that Revit instills, part is simply that Revit is so much cleverer.
So why did I switch back for a whole weekend ? 

Try as you may, Revit modelling tools struggle to make decent sanitary ware.  If you look at my review of American Standard Revit families, it's clear that the ones that use CAD imports are more convincing.  In my view this is not really a weakness of Revit.  The modelling tools are very effective for construction elements.  They're user-friendly,  Sketch Mode is great, (you can back-track any time you like and rework your profiles) and the whole approach lends itself to parametric control.  It's just that AutoCAD solid modelling is more effective for certain kinds of shape.  Sometimes, different is good.

So I am making the effort to re-acquire some fluency in AutoCAD.

The starting point was a mesh created by our visualisation guys in MAX.  Looks great in their renders, but not so smooth in Revit.  My approach was to create closed polylines and loft them.  There is a great tool for rounding off edges, and you can subtract one solid from another.

I struggled with the UCS for a while, but then I remembered UCSfollow, which speeded the process a little.  I longed for the simplicity of reference planes to guide the symmetry.  But I kept going and managed to make a reasonable pan for my WC. 

Looks much crisper in 3d than the mesh, but for orthographic, nothing beats masking regions and symbolic lines.

For the seat and the cistern I dug out a "rounded rectangle" family from my Pillows Post.  Parametric radius corners !  Now this is where Revit excells. 

One Family Type for the cistern

And another Type for the Seat

Rendered up together in Revit, my family comes out much crisper than the mesh version.  But I'm not quite happy.  It's good enough for most purposes, but when I downloaded a better reference image I realised that my form is missing some subtle curvature.  I could do better, but not sure when this will make it to the top of my to do list.

Some of you may be asking why I'm going to all this trouble.  Why not just use a simple generic toilet in the drawings and specify the model number ?  Isn't all this 3d detail killing the processor ? 

Well it all depends.  If you've got 500 toilets in the project you probably want to keep it simple.  If you only have 4 or 5 and it's high end work with an Interior Design component, detailed 3d Revit families can really help. 

So why not let the manufacturer do it ?  That would be great, but this particular manufacturer doesn't have even 3d CAD downloads so I made the effort.  I'm also thinking that those of us with the  capability and the inclination can set some benchmarks for manufacturers to aspire to.  And if I publish my efforts maybe someone else can contribute comments/improvements/alternatives.