Monday, June 17, 2013

SPIKEY STUFF

SPIKEY STUFF

I posted about this way back.  

http://grevity.blogspot.ae/2012/03/more-bermuda-triangles.html

http://grevity.blogspot.ae/2012/03/drawing-curtain.html

Spikey geometry is generally easier to make in sketchup than directly in conceptual massing.  If anyone has the answer to doing it in Revit, please share, because I have failed.  You can go so far, then you get stuck.  Revit massing loves nurbs surfaces & curvy blends.  Sketchup can't do that, has to fake curves with a smoothing algorithm, because what it really loves are triangles.  It makes meshes.

Revit topography is a mesh, but just about everything else is solid geometry.  The interesting thing is that it can take a Sketchup mesh & convert it into a solid ... within limits.  For example, make an extrusion in Sketchup.  Draw a couple of diagonals on faces. Push & pull a bit.  Save.  Now open Revit.  Make an in-place mass (or an external mass family)  Import the skp file into the mass.  Finish mass.  Make mass floors.  It works.


But if you carry on playing around, pushing & pulling, triangulating & twisting: at some point it will break.  Then you get the dreaded message as you finish the mass: "... contains only mesh geometry ... can't be used to compute Mass Floors ..."  End of story.



A year ago I failed to find a way around this. Then I was thinking about some work that Jerome Buckwell & Liam Carey presented in Auckland.  They have been exploring workflows between Sketchup & Revit for concept design with considerable success.  I hope they will forgive me for including a low-res snippet from their presentation here.  It's a bit different from what I was attempting, but it got me to thinking.



If you load the Sketchup file as a link, you can keep both applications open.  Make a few changes in skp, save, reload in Revit.  If no error, carry on.  If error, backtrack & try again.



Bear in mind that my skp skills vanished about a decade ago. But gradually I found that I was evading the error message as I cycled through the process repeatedly



Just to demonstrate that Revit converts the mesh into a true solid I changed the cut pattern of the material to solid red.  Section box cuts through just as if it were standard Revit geometry.



Using this method I managed to develop quite a complex form while keeping mass floors alive.  It would be better if I had some clear rules as to what causes the "can't compute" error.  But for the meantime the "baby steps cycle" provides a workaround.


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