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.