CHURCH IN SITE (LAND AHOY)

 Sneak peek. I've been labouring away with Forma. It's been a while and saving was awfully slow. My Internet, the ridiculous extent of the Hampshire map (for a Revit file)  I soon realised that I needed to package the Forma data into a separate Revit file then link it into the map. I was creating site context for St Laurence Woodhay (by Blomfield) Turns out that there are rolling hills and valleys. Definitely a new insight.

I changed the colour of the road subdivision, added a few floor slabs to represent the churchyard, village plots, a lake. Set up some assembly views of the church. Makes for a fun sheet with room for a couple of photographs. Not finished yet. I want to populate the churchyard for example. Put some indicative houses in the village. Make a massing model for Inigo Jones' manor house.  But it's coming along.

 

Some process shots. In Forma you can capture a square from anywhere in earth (maybe not the poles) and choose from various sources of data. There’s enough free stuff on the list to satisfy me. Topo, roads, boundaries … also buildings and trees, but in this case that doesn’t amount to much. The great thin is the texture mapping. You have to be in a realistic view in Revit for this to show up, but I actually find the ability to flip back and forth between the two really useful.

I haven’t yet mastered getting it to come in the right place automatically. Probably not a big deal since I’m putting it in a wrapper, so it makes sense to place the forma data at the origin in that linked Revit file. The 3d toposolid with contours totally transformed my understanding of the site context. It’s a series of ridge-&-furrow-like folds running diagonally across the site with small streams that flow eventually into the Kennet and thence the Thames.

 

The texture maps clearly show areas of woodland and agricultural fields. It helps to select the strips of topo that represent roads and change their colour. I chose a very pale grey.  West Woodhay Park has one of the streams crossing the property. By damming this at the road has created a “bell-head” lake which enhances the view from the house which is quite naturally built on high ground and along the countours, facing downhill.

I placed the linked file in its own workset, named with the same code as the church. This will ease the burden of selective opening when I add more and more location studies.

 

So the next thing was to develop the churchyard. A coupe of floor slab objects, one flatter than the other representing the churchyard itself and the adjacent Memorial Garden. I still need to add the central pavilion in the garden, plus some shrubs lining the paths perhaps. A family to represent graves with a choice of headstone will be universally useful going forward so I should have a go at that soon. Probably do a simple one and improve it iteratively.  The (grey) trees that came in from forma are low-poly objects. Possible to change the colour in visibility graphics. Enscape uses a similar type of geometry in it’s tree families and I have some of these saved in a file, so I used one of these and created different sizes (easy to do with a double-nested planting family) Using a translucent green material works quite well but with the down-side of not casting shadows.

 

 

 

INSIDE THE BUBBLE. (WOODHAY AI)

 In theory I was just placing an instance of the church model at an elevation of about 150m, within the churchyard, but inevitably whenever I look at one of these massing studies for any length of time I find myself wanting to do updates. I started with an improvement to the window family so that it shows up on both sides of the extrusion that represents a wall. Then of course I went inside to check how this was working.

 

Revit has always been an application that favours orthographic and isometric views for modelling but we did get true perspective without a crop region a few years ago, and this can sometimes be a great way to model interior elements. It’s been a while since I did much of this and it was rarely in Family Editor, so I got quite excited about fleshing out the interior of the West Woodhay church in a perspective view. For the most part, these are extrusions, but I did convert the roof truss into a nested family after a while. Better for memory management and for things lime arrays.  I also created a pew family of variable length. That’s going to be applicable to most churches.

 

I don’t have views of the North wall, so can only guess at the fenestration. It’s clear now that the spacing of the trusses and placement of windows must follow a connected logic. Not much point in speculating further until I get the chance to visit. Of course I never expected to take these simple “LOD100” massing families quite so far, but there’s nothing better that when a learning project takes you to new places.

 

Here's one of the joys of old age, waking up in the middle of the night... repeatedly. Sometimes I embrace the quiet time and subtle energy of one of the wakeful interludes and put it to work. Of course afternoon naps are also a thing. Perhaps the endgame is a life of many more, shorter days, existing in bursts of bright energy between battery charges.

It's 5am and I've been lying awake with my phone for quite a while, culminating in discovering for the first time that AI has become a truly useful supplement to my work.  I used Google Gemini after failing to figure out Stable Diffusion. Starting with a screenshot from Revit of the interior of St Laurence, West Woodhay by Sir Arthur Blomfield. Here are the prompts.

• ​Add people to this church interior (Initial Request)
• ​Place candlesticks on the altar and stained glass in the windows
• ​Add a watercolour effect to the image
• ​Add boarding lines to the wooden ceiling

I made the collage in my usual way with PIXLR. I tried with Gemini but it couldn't remember back more than one prompt. So I think this qualifies as a true collaboration between me, traditional software and AI.

Best of all, making the original Revit model is my favourite activity and helps me to understand the why questions. Populating with entourage is just a chore that I rarely attempt. But it's sure nice to have if I can get there in 10 or 15 minutes. By the way, notice how Gemini/Banana boy took some initiative and gave the floor an interesting texture. Not archaeologically accurate but quite plausible. 😎 

 

CHASING THE PERPENDICULAR

 More tracery. This time on St Mary Fratton. Perpendicular style using the tudor arch. Once again there is no way this is going to be parametric. In the vertical direction maybe. Just stretch the lower part which is all parallel lines. But changing the width is going to be complicated. In any case the different sizes of window have different tracery patterns, so it’s going to be a separate family for each window type and the size will be fixed.  First off is a drafting view where I explore the geometry and how much I can simplify for current purposes.

 

 

Then I work up the actual family. Could be a short sweep like last time, but an extrusion would also work because the size is frozen.  I’ve simplified it further on translation to solid geometry. We can always come back and elaborate.  In real life it’s not just and extruded shape of course. The cross section of the mullions has a subtle tapering and curvature, but this is a massing model so let’s keep it indicative. Just convey the impression of gothic tracery.

I arrayed this window type for the full length of the clerestory, both sides.  Definitely an improvement, so let’s keep moving forward.

 

There is a window high up on the sides of the chancel. This can be adapted from the clerestory type. I haven’t quite got the proportions right, but let’s not get bogged down right now. We’re talking broad brush here.

Finally there is a wider window along the aisles.  This one bothers me a bit. Somehow it’s lost the delicacy of the original, but I can’t see a quick fix at the moment. So once again I will be moving on because it’s a big church and there are other window types to tackle including the huge window at the East end. I think I should also do something about the battlements

 

 

TRACING ST LAURENCE

 

It’s time to look at tracery.  Let’s start with another drafting view and a real-life example from Blomfield’s churches.  It’s still a massing model so I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds. St Laurence, West Woodhay, up there close to Hungerford in the NW corner of my study area. It’s a very cute little village church, flint with Bath stone dressings. Typically for Blomfield most of the windows are Early English style lancets with no tracery.  So faithful to the spirit of Gothic and realistically cost effective for a small Victorian church.  Britannia was a wealthy society, but villages didn’t have unlimited budgets. My sketch aims to capture the principles but not necessarily the proportions. It's easy enough to stretch the sill down. I may well be using this basic configuration several times on different churches beyond the world of Arthur Blomfield.

 

St Mary, Sheet is almost identical to West Woodhay in it’s overall massing. The spire is different and the tracery more elaborate. Possibly the budget was more generous. It’s even more obvious that this one is not going to be parametric. Once again you can drop the sill easily enough, but probably be opening up in Family Editor rather than trying to get the tracery geometry to respond predictably to the Height parameter. Let’s keep things simple here. I’m perfectly happy to take a copy of a nested family and adapt it “by hand” to suite another context if that is less effort than making it super parametric so that it adapts to every possible use case simply be typing into the Properties dialogue. It comes down to a judgement call, which is not too hard to make when the geometry reaches this level of complexity.

 

Trying out tracery on an actual church model. All the windows are face-based families. I brought a couple of reference images into plan view for guidance. It may seem perverse to model the tracery as a very short sweep. Basically it’s a way of freezing the shape so it doesn’t distort when the width and height parameters change. Unlike extrusions.

The different sizes of windows, doors and louvred are all types of the same family. Only one type needs tracery. That’s why one fixed size of tracery geometry will do the job. All we need is a visibility parameter to hide it in all the other types.

Reload into the host family. Orbit around the model selecting the types one by one and switching off the tracery. You can see from this view of the East end that the sweep geometry is stable.

 

Inevitably when reloading the family into the project, I start to notice minor issues with proportions, roof slope etc. So there are several other enhancements here. In fact there is another window in the centre of the West End that has tracery. I chose to have two sweeps in the model with slightly different profiles to suit the dimensions of the family type. Both have visibility controls, so they are switched of selectively for the various types. 

This church now has a higher level of detail than I originally imagined, much more than most of the other models in my study. Will I go back and lift the level of all the others? I don’t know, let’s take it one step at a time, and trust my instincts. This is supposed to be a fun project for my retirement from Godwin Austen Johnson. Real buildings with a deep sense of history all within striking distance of the retirement flat which will be my primary residence from April 2026.