Thursday, May 22, 2014

TUBULAR BELTS

Some time last year we were doing a quick design for a pedestrian link, kind of a glorified footbridge.  You can guess what software the guys used.  It wasn't Revit.  But the question came up ... "how would you approach a quick concept like this in Revit"



First solution was a tube lofted from a series of ellipses.  Wanted to wrap it in a birds nest of random diagonals. Doesn't help that the surface is in 2 halves.

One way to deal with that is to leave a little gap at the bottom of the tube.



The diagonals are going to be multi-point adaptives that snap to nodes on the divided surface.



With a bit of experimentation, this approach delivers something quite interesting, but not quite as random as I'm looking for.



So let's try something different.  Void tube inside a solid tube will give me a tube with thickness to the walls.  Not hard to set that one up.  Then we have a void extrusion in the form of a giant comb.  Nudge the lines around to create a variety of random effects.



Join two or 3 of these sliced and diced tubes together to create the second option.  There is potential here, but I am not looking to complete the exercise. just a quick exploration of possibilities.



So next we go for a square tube.  The framing is going to be based on two point adpative components.  Nice and simple.



Generic Model Adaptive.  Place 2 points, make them adaptive.  Select, spline through points.  Check "Is Ref Line". Set the active workplane to the horizotal plane of this ref line.  Draw 4 ref lines.  Equalise.  Width parameter.



Add an angle parameter for the end line.  Select the loop.  Create an extrusion. Load the component into the square tube.  Place and repeat.  Play around with the possibilities.



I decided that it would be interesting to contrast the random diagonals with a regular islamic mushrabiya pattern.  I've shown how to do this before.



So it was just a quick exploration, but I delivered some interesting images to stick up on the notice board in the office, just to show that Revit has potential for early design work.  Hope it sparks of some ideas in your head too.





2 comments:

  1. Hi Andy,

    Great Post! People need to be open minded about using Revit for this sort of quick study, it might not be easy first but with some practice, you will be able to do some great stuff with it. Keep up you good work!

    Philip

    ReplyDelete
  2. thank for the wonderful post , lots of information gained , visit us Revit Modeling in uk

    ReplyDelete

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