ROUTE 66

Staying with the musical references.  Rolling Stones or Nat King Cole, take your pick.

One of the comments on my previous post was to suggest I should be using Civil 3D.  I don't have that option at present, but if I did, would that be the best way ?  I am dealing with a situation where we have buildings and alleyways cascading down a hillside like a mediterranean fishing village. 

The buildings are all in Revit.  As architects we need to have the whole thing in Revit to produce our drawings.  If the paths and roads are done in a different software won't it be a bit cumbersome sending things backwards and forwards via some intermediate file format ?  We may find out shortly, because I think the engineers will be using Civil 3D.  But we will be driving the design.  It's an upmarket resort, so we need to be in control of what it feels like to walk around the place.  I think we may be best off getting it 90% right in Revit before handing over to the engineers to do their engineering thing in proper civils software.

Seems to me an interesting metaphor for the whole architect-engineer relationship.  Can Revit work nicely with Civil 3D ? ... Can Architects work nicely with Engineers ?  Some Engineers seem to like working with Architects, getting into the design process, exploring solutions, trying to understand what the essential issues are.  Others just want to do it by the book ... as in "Finish your drawings, send them over, then we'll do our work"

In this case we had an engineer who saw the main entrance into a resort as "draw a straight line from A to B, calculate the gradient, cut holes in the mountain as necessary.  To us it was "How do you make this an arrival experience ?" plus "Can we tread lightly on the existing mountainside ?"

In Revit terms it was an interesting challenge.  We had a route in mind by now, but what would the slopes be and how gently could we tread in terms of cut and fill ?  This was easiest done with sloping pads.  The result was a bit diagrammatic but it was exactly what we needed to inform a design team discussion. 

Having achieved a tentative "maybe" from the engineers, the next step was to convey the arrival experience so as to really convince the client body that this is the way to go.  Which is where my previous methodology came into its own.  Fitting a smoothly curving road over the pads was easy with the in-place massing family I had already developed.  By changing the shape of the profile I could also simulate a fill slope where the road comes out of the ground by a metre or so.  I felt it was OK to leave the cut slopes vertical for present purposes.

I tried taking this whole thing into Showcase (via FBX) to make an interactive presentation.  It worked OK but I was struggling a bit with the interface.  The jury is still out on Showcase to be honest.  I see that other people have noticed that it eats RAM.  Really struggled when I first tried it out with a fairly large detailed model.  On the positive side, the graphics are certainly much better than Design Review.

But then I went back into Revit to make some adjustments and thought, "what about a walkthrough".
 Believe it or not, I haven't used the walkthrough tool in Revit for years.  Turns out that this was the ideal situation to reacquaint myself.  You just place a series of cameras in a plan view, go into 3d, switch to a side view with the view cube, pull the cameras up and down to follow the elevation of the road and you're done.  At the time I couldn't work out how to readjust the camera heights later on, but today I realised you just have to go to the options bar drop-down and choose path. 

The result was a fairly crude, low-res grainy video clip, ... all I needed at this stage to convey the arrival experience. 

So Civil 3D may be wonderful, but for the moment I am happy that my Revit hacks are doing the job for us and keeping the design process tight and integrated.  Comments welcome,

PS it's getting late and I've got the flu so I'm off home.  Maybe I'll get a chance to post the video clip tomorrow

HIGHWAY TO HELL

Just for the record I'm not a big ACDC fan, but I've been developing some approaches to roads and paths that wind their way around a mountainside over the past couple of months.  One or two challenges on the way.

The first attempt was based on the idea of circles in plan that guide the spacing of points and dropping down from these points one metre at a time to give path gradients of 1:10, 1:20 etc depending on the diameter of the circles.

It's an adaptive component. A rectangular profile hosted on the lower point sets the width & depth of the path.  You can adjust the points directly in the project to make the road/path snake around the contours.  I made a pad to cut a channel through the mountain for my snake to rest in.

The sketch of the pad uses splines so I can adjust the edges of the cut, then painstakingly create bits of topography to simulate cut and fill slopes.  I was helping a design team to study alternative routes for an entrance road and get some feedback on how this impacted on the mountainside.  By the time we reached option 4, we needed more points and I decided to try a different, looser approach, just modelling directly in place.  Still massing, but just setting up a 3d spline by points, then hosting points on that and adding profiles as needed.

One of the challenges was how to keep the road from twisting.  This is where the title comes from.  Minor adjustments are fine, but if you make a major change to the route, the road starts to lurch around like a drunken man.

You can fix this by selecting the profiles one by one and rotating them back to a more horizontal position.  It's almost as painful as the point-by-point adjustment needed for the topography.  Roll on better site tools.  (We live in hope)  But we got what we needed from the exercise and I learnt some important lessons along the way (as usual).

That was 3 or 4 weeks ago.  Now we have to create a network of paths within the site itself and linking together the various elements within the resort.  So I wanted to come up with plan C that would have the freedom to add more points easily and also keep the path perfectly level during the adjustment process.

So I am starting with an in-place mass, setting the work plane to zero (sea level in this case) and drawing a spline.  Then I host points on the spline and change their "measurement type" parameter to "segment length"  This gives me a string of beads spaced at regular distances along a freely adjustable path.

Next step is to select all the points and change "show reference plane" to "always".   This allows me to  place a profile family on each point.  Then select all the profiles and "create form" 

Because all the points lie on a level plane, their reference planes will not twist when the path is adjusted.  So my profiles remain level, and an instance parameter allows me to set the height above sea level. 

Now I am in business.  I can adjust the centreline of my path in a plan view with the countours of the site visible.  I have points at regular distances (say every 10m) and I can set the height of the path at each and every point.  The profiles will always be at right angles to the centre line and remain level.  If I want a 2% cross-fall then I can build that into the profile family which is a based on a Mass template and set up very simply in a plan view.

I'm very happy with the result.  Next step is to start placing these on the site.

And here's a link to the download  "key to the highway"

WIGGLY TOPO

Park Guell sits in a horseshoe shaped basin nestled into the foothills of the mountains behind Barcelona.  At 148m above sea level, the main terrace has stunning views over the city and out to sea.  How to get this into my Revit model ?  Can I grab contours from Google Earth ?

A quick search throws up references in Revit Forum and CAD addict, two excellent sources of information.  There is a plug-in for AutoCAD available as a free download on Autodesk LABS.  This creates a mesh.  Save to DWG, link into Revit and create topography by import instance: click, tick, done.

This is wonderful, but I want to see trees and houses, and those wonderful elevated roadways that snake around the folds of the hills, supported on random stone pillars. vaults and buttresses in trademark Gaudi style.  As you can see I was successful.  The challenge was to create a material from Google Earth imagery, scale it correctly, and map it onto the topography.

If you switch to realistic view in AutoCAD, you will see that the mesh already has a low-res image draped over the terrain.  This is useful.  I can inspect the corners carefully to decide where to crop my image.  The image itself comes from Google Earth Pro which allows you to save at higher resolutions.  If you only have the free version that's fine, the results will still be useable.

My aim is to create a Russian Doll effect.  A site, within a site, within a site.  The inner portion will be fully modelled in Revit. The next shell will be fairly high resolution topography and imagery.  As we proceed outwards the resolution will necessarily become coarser.  No problem.  All I need is the impression of the city spreading out over the coastal plain with the sea shimmering out on the horizon.
My Russian dolls are linked Revit files with shared coordinates and levels.  The main file, is modelled directly in Revit.  There is no imagery mapped onto the topography here.  Instead I have subregions with materials for grass, footpaths, etc.  This is topo 1. 

Topo 2 is a linked Revit file with a larger rectangle of topography.  I have carefully cropped an image to match the rectangle that was grabbed by the Autocad Plug-in, and set up a plan view that allows me to decide on the real-world size of this "rectangle" ... which is actually somewhat distorted as it wraps over the contours.

Next step is to create a material based on the cropped image and scale it up to life size.  For some crazy reason I had to mirror all my images (rotate canvas, flip horizontal in Photoshop)  It's almost as if the topography turns itself inside out during the "create from import instance" process.  Also had to rotate 90 in most cases and to adjust the X & Y offsets.  If you are not familiar with these features in appearance tab of the materials dialogue, now is a good time to explore.  They are hidden in a secret room, accessed by clicking on the image.  To choose a new image you have to click on its name.  It's easy once you know how.

Be aware that the mesh is quite crude.  If you are a real architect doing a real job for a real client ... better get a real survey done by a real land surveyor.  But for early concept work, (or explorations into Gaudi) it's certainly much better than guess work.

I decided to record some levels and coordinates from Google Earth to check against my Revit model.    This is all useful information when it comes to setting up a shared coordinates and levels system.  My first attempts to creat meshes were incorrectly scaled.  Need to set units in both Google Earth and AutoCAD, then check the results before moving on, 



It is well known that Revit hates DWG style Real World Coordinates.  You have to accept centre-to-centre imports.  I am sure many of you have struggled with this.  In this case the DWG files are Revit friendly if you accept the default values when creating the mesh (enter, enter = place at 0,0 with zero rotation)  Vertical heights will be correct, but to locate X & Y you will need Northings and Eastings for a known feature. 

In practice this meant some manual adjustment when linking Topo 1 into Topo 2 (for example)  Once you have linked any 2 files together and shared coordinates, you are in business.  You can now link any 2 files by shared coordinates, load and unload at your pleasure.  Once again, if you are not too familiar with shared coordinates yet, get your hands dirty.  Experiment and learn.  It may seem hard at first, but it's wonderful, powerful stuff "once you know how". 

One problem with multiple nested sites is going to be 3 sets of topography in the same place.  The larger pieces are extremely crude and will obscure the more detailed modelling of the smaller ones.  My solution is to create resizeable holes: voids that allow the Russian Dolls to sit inside each other.  Resizeable is especially important in the middle because I want to gradually eliminate the crude Google Earth topograhy as I replace it with Revit objects.  What do you call a resizeable hole in Revit topography ?  Yes, it's a pad.

If you check out some of my images you will see where Topo 1 and Topo 2 are weaving in and out of each other.  I am gradually reducing this effect by editing topo 1, moving individual points up and down.  It's all very ad-hoc, but in the absence of highly detailed survey information ... it works for me.  I ended up with 4 topo surfaces, the biggest being almost 8km wide. 

Don't know if anyone else has used this method, or can suggest improvements.  At the moment I am quite excited by the potential.  Can't wait to put Corb's chapel on its hill overlooking the village of Ronchamp and identify the paths that pilgrims take up the hill.  When is a pilgrim not a pilgrim ?  (think Tourist, but then maybe tourism is the modern form of pilgrimage.  Worship the sun and the sand, the wilderness, the historic creations of past architects.  Restore your soul with a journey to some metaphoric Canterbury)

And so my last image is of Gaudi's hypostyle hall at dawn with shafts of light streaming in to wake the oracle.  And my oracle is telling me that there are many more mysteries to be uncovered at Park Guell if I have the patience and endurance to continue to model.  So far my representations are as crude as topography I grabbed from Google Earth.  There are so many avenues to be explored: wrought iron railings and gates, the gatehouses, the raised roadways, how to represent the broken tile patterns ? how to model the rough stone work ?

Behind it all the deeper issue of how to abstract something highly complex into a simpler version that is managable, recognisable and useful.  It's sometimes called seeing the wood from the trees and it's "what Architects do." 

FIRST PRINCIPAL

Last night we were at the Middle East Architect awards ceremony, held on the Palm Jumeirah, which is a short taxi ride from our offices.  We had entered several categories and came away with 4 second places plus one outright winner. 

Appropriately it was our boss, Brian Johnson who won : Principal of the Year 2011, in recognition of 30 years of outstanding work in the Region, including one of Dubai's first iconic buildings, the Creek Golf Club, which features on the 20 Dirham note.  Not so many architectural practices who can hand out bank notes as business cards :)

This year there was a new category: BIM Project of the Year, and I am proud to say that we earned a "Highly Commended" second place for the work my Revit team has done on Saray Bandar Jissah in Oman.  A big thank you for all the guys & gals on the team for all the effort they have put in over the past year on this challenging project.

This is a residential resort with about 350 villas, a short drive from Muscat .  Advanced earthworks are due to start later this year.  The setting is quite dramatic with jagged mountain ridges and valleys leading to an unspoilt beach on the India Ocean.  Our Revit work ranged from Strategic Masterplanning to meticulous detailing of bathroom layouts. 

We have a complex set of cross-linked and nested files in order to handle the complexity of the site within our hardware constraints.  All the villas have 2 versions: the full villa with all the CD sheets and a simplified massing model, sufficient for most masterplanning exercises.  We swop these links in and out as needed.  There is a file for the overall topography, with holes cut in it for each group of villas.  Typically we have 10 or 12 villas in each zone file, where we model all the platform levels, the cut and fill, the landscaping, streel lights etc.

The infrastructure engineers issue their drawings in separate packages arranged by sub-discipline.  The Revit model has really helped us to see how the earthworks, surface drainage, retaining walls, etc fit together in 3 dimensions.  In many cases of course they don't fit together, and very rarely do they take into account the architectural and landscape design requirements, partly because their work had to be completed far in advance of ours, so they are always trying to finalise things before we have been able to develop our designs properly. 

Conversely the landscape designers are a couple of steps behind us and often only have 2 dimensional concept sketches, when we really need to finalise ground shaping levels with the engineers.  Our masterplanning model has been a fantastic tool for highlighting critical issues that need to be resolved and obtaining sign-off of the decisions that matter so that the engineers can complete their tender package and the landscape guys know the parameters whithin which they will have to work when they move to detailed design.

At a smaller scale we have had to develop a strategy that allows a mass concrete marine wall to be built 2 years in advance to a pool specialist coming on site to construct infinity edge pools that overlook a salt-water lagoon.  Once again it was essential to be able to visualise relationships between different elements owned by multiple stakeholders in the design team, and to think about sequences of operations.  Revit has a great ability to duplicate views and hide elements so that you can simulate a construction sequence.  The section box views are also crucial to this kind of coordination exercise.

For the bathrooms I went onto the Duravit & Hansgrohe sites to download 3d CAD models of the selected fittings and incorporated these into Revit families.  Often these familes contain 3 or 4 nested components pre-configured into their correct relationships (toilet pan, TRH, push plate, hand spray, cistern boxing)  If the relationships change,  the families can be reloaded into the 50 or so bathroom types in the project to maintian consistency with very little effort.  This is where the the "revise instantly" origin of the Revit name is vindicated.

Kitchens were done to similar level of detail, and our client put us through 3 or 4 design iterations, all presented in cutaway perspective views as well as traditional plans & elevations for each of the dozen or so kitchen types.

I'll try to do a more detailed post on some of the families we developed for this project soon, but to conclude here's a rendering of one of the villas done directly from the Revit model