DORIC PUMPKINS REVISITED

This is the second in a series of posts looking back over nine years of blogging.

An awards dinner, an honourable mention and I seem to remember getting rather drunk with on of the partners. Our submission for the BIM category was rather too complex and unconventional to be an outright winner. But the project was a tremendous learning experience for me, which is surely the greatest prize. Topography is another of those love-hate features in Revit.  One day we will have a better solution, but you can actually do an awful lot with Revit topo, as I found on this project, it just takes time. 



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/first-principal.html

I had a young Australian friend in the office around this time.  He was a design architect who was the value of starting early with Revit.  Sadly he was a bit out of step with senior management and eventually he moved on.  But for a while we had some great discussions and I tackled all kinds of challenges that he presented to me.  In this post I showcased some renderings that he did in his spare time for a private client, all from Revit, some with the inbuilt render engine, others using the link to Max. 



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/beam-me-up-scotty.html

I picked up some tricks for processing Revit output in Photoshop quite early on via the internet, and over the years have tweaked and varied these processes in different ways.  This post covers several useful techniques using real life examples from my day job.  The most fundamental trick is to export a hidden line view and a render to the same width ( in pixels) and put them on different layers.  Then you can use various blending and masking techniques to make the image resemble a hand-drawn perspective.  This is another example of giving our minds just the right cues to jump to a useful conclusion.  We are always favourably impressed with a well-drawn sketch from real life.  It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling, connects to works of art in the labyrinth of connected neurons within the cerebral cortex.  Most of this is subconscious and all the more effective as a result. 

If you can manipulate an image from the model in 5-10 minutes then it is really worth doing.  If it takes much longer than that, then the pain of having to do it again when the model changes becomes too much to bear.  That’s my rule of thumb.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/image-manipulation.html

Archicad.  I played around with early versions before Revit even existed, and could easily have ended up a devoted user.  But life took a different turn and I ended up in a Revit office.  There was a seminar about this time that advertised itself as a BIM event.  In the end it was exclusively about Archicad, although this wasn’t made at all clear in the blurb.  No big deal, it was quite interesting, and I find the animosity thing between fan bases very boring.  There are pros and cons.  I have heard different opinions from believable sources.  In the end I think it’s about what you can do with the software, most of all what IDEAS you have to share (design ideas, historical ideas, interpretations)  Michelangelo was not defined by the quality of his chisels or his paint brushes. His technical skill was important, but much less significant that his vision.  Can you express yourself with BIM?  Do you have something to say?



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/anyone-for-bimicad.html

Another interaction with a supplier at a CPD session.  Stamped concrete is an interesting technology for quickly and cheaply mimicking natural materials with complex textures and variability.  I tried to convey to this company rep how useful it would be if they learnt how to set up Revit materials for their wide range of finish options.  She showed some interest but didn’t really pick up on it like I had hoped.  One day.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/stamp-collection.html

This post is centred around my decision to share a bunch of furniture families.  I’m a firm believer in open sharing of content.  I had been to Uganda a little while before and wanted to use the post to express some broader thoughts about fair trade and the enormous variations in lifestyle and living standards between different global regions.  I don’t believe in simplistic solutions or in blame culture/virtue signaling.  I think we need to be honest and aware of reality.  Do our best to interact positively with the world around us.  Cherish the good things in the societies we inhabit.  I feel privileged to have lived on three continents for over a decade each.  Been a hell of a ride :)


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/come-shop-with-me.html

Ceilings.  Another bug-bear.  How do you do coffers?  There is a hack that allows you to smuggle system categories into family editor, but it’s a bit suspect.  Would be nice if it loadable families could be assigned to a ceilings category.  Anyway this is a family I developed around that time.  Ceiling-hosted, cuts a hold and inserts a coffer, type in the width, length and height, specify the lighting cornice moulding profile.  Haven’t used it in a while.  Front of house has been handled by a separate sub-consultant on most of my recent jobs.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/hitting-ceiling.html

And here comes the pumpkin experience.  This was another of those remarkable coincidences that keep cropping up in my life. I received a suggestion from a follower for a scalable profile for the doric columns in my “lunch with the gods” post. It was tour-de-force with formulae galore and using point world.  A light bulb moment occurred, and I came up with my own solution, which just so happened to allow for the profile to turn itself “inside out”.  A second light bulb popped up and told me that an inside out Doric Column was in fact a pumpkin.  All this as Zach Kron was announcing his annual competition.  A bit of fun which had produced some fascinating entries over the past 3 years.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/exploring-pumpkinland.html

Light bulb number 3 said to me “why don’t you do your competition entry as a series of live blog posts?” … a feat of reckless bravado that served as an incredible motivator for me as I ramped up the complexity of my submissions for 4 competitions in a row.



Now my “way we build” hat said “this is a perfect opportunity to model Adolf Loos entry for the Chicago Tribune competition, which took the form of a giant doric column.  So that was the basis of my second post.  Amazingly I have never gone back to develop this further.  But it was a good exercise, using wall-by-face to convert a massing object into a real building.  Along the way, I had already discovered what an astounding array of forms my parametric family was capable of producing if I added a parameter to swap out different profiles.  This on top of using the same family for the whole building and the three storey columns framing the entrance.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/when-is-pumpkin-not-pumpkin.html

Post 3 accepted the challenge of making the pumpkin version more organic.  Allow a couple of the lobes to have a greater “bulge factor” and apply a textured material.  Not bad.  Render it up, add a bit of cinderella stuff in the background.  Quite a story line developing here.  Why did I add the 4 points of Le Corbusier?



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/going-organic.html

Now once you have an organic thing going, there are all kinds of possibilities.  It could be more of a gourd than a pumpkin or it could even be a mushroom.  Suddenly we have switched from Cinderella to Alice in Wonderland.  I was getting very interested in blurring the boundaries between BIM and fantasy, BIM and art.  Pushing back against the “nerd” label I suppose.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/mushrooms-mice.html

I explored methods for making the pumpking hollow, and this led to even more metamorphoses.  You could turn it into a 1970s lamp shade, or some kind of jellyfish, maybe even a lemon squeezer.  Self-intersecting geometry even seemed possible without breaking the family.



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/into-void.html

My final post was a set of conclusions and reflections.  What had I achieved?  What were the limitations?  How could it be made more user friendly.  What were some of the potential applications of the ideas that I had explored?  Then I cleaned up the different versions of the family, popped them into a project in an orderly manner and … submitted.

As an aside, this was an early example of my attempts to bring freehand sketching back into my work process.  I think I drew these on paper and then coloured them up in photoshop, but I did by a funny little device called an inkling around that time also. 


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/10/pumpkin-postscript.html

It was an incredible year for submissions.  Marcello also tackled metamorphosis, but in a way that was more “Hammer Horror” than “Walt Disney”  Phillip Chan designed a pumpkin-based apartment block.  So I was thrilled to stand on the (virtual) podium alongside these two giants who have since become good friends. 



https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/11/winning-ways.html

That’s chapter 2 of my "blog story" folks and I'm feeling quite nostalgic.  A year on from my very first post and a head bursting with ideas and motivation.  Where to next?

ORGANIC ELEPHANTS

First off a shot of our Revit model of Notre Dame, as a VR experience at BiLT EU (Edinburgh)  Sadly none of us could be there, but it was good to send our baby along instead.  Thanks to Cameron for the pic.

I’m preparing for my AU session. I wanted a better image for the slide about maintenance access routes. So I decided to insert a representation of the spiral stairs. If you look carefully, the stairs don’t arrive at the right place for the doors. Actually some of those doors are in the wrong place, anyway. We are still figuring it out. Which means, model something. Take a look at it. Ask interesting questions. Come back a few weeks later and have another go. Rough sketching with BIM.

Q) When is an elephant not an elephant?  

A) when it’s a grotesque.

This weekend I added the first grotesque to the BIM360 model, essentially a collaboration between Ryan and Francois. Actually I added it a couple of times. When we have more variations on the grotesque theme I will dot them around all the internal and external corners of the skywalk.

enscape3d-ELEPHANT-panorama

Ryan also contributed a detailed organ model to replace the very basic placeholder I knocked together early on. So I loaded this up and fleshed out the flanking walls a bit, correcting alignments, adding arched recesses and little bundles of colonnettes. Great work Ryan, by the way.

I also placed a vault at the top level. It’s the same hexapartite as used on the nave and unfortunately doesn’t respond to parametric controls, but will have to do for now. I’m very conscious of how much remains to be resolved, but right now I can only touch issues lightly, here and there.

enscape3d-ORGAN LOFT-panorama

GREY STORY : NINE YEARS AGO

I have a structured set of folders on my hard/cloud drive containing all the material used to create blog posts here over the past 9 years. A while ago I decided to take snapshots of the folder contents to create a visual overview of how my work has evolved. I started by working backwards from the present & got about halfway.  Recently I began another push & on a whim, reversed my method, intending to meet in the middle. After a little while I realised that I was telling myself a story as I went along and that it was quite interesting. So here is the story of my blog, serialized, with pictures.

It begins with the Quick Access Toolbar I had recently developed. Part of the justification of my blog was to disseminate ideas to other Revit users at GAJ. 9 years later almost no one makes use of the QAT, except for cases where I have done it for them. Seems strange to me. It’s such a simple thing but it’s saved me thousands of clicks over the years. Just decide which commands are buried too deep for your liking and bring them to the surface.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2010/10/post-no-1.html

I had been using Revit for 5 or 6 years, following several blogs (Dave Light, Steve Stafford, Zach Kron who else?)   Dubai has a great need for shade structures, and a long tradition of hanging cloth over spaces where people sit and drink tea, smoke shisha.  Tension structures have become popular as a modern equivalent, so I had a go at creating a family with three angled posts and a triangular sail.  I think adaptive components were not yet invented so this was rather a dumb, in-place effort. I made an adaptive version a couple of years later which we have used on several projects.  Actually this was never used as a blog post, but I did use some of the images on a page called “experiments” that is accessible from the row of buttons just below the title banner.  It’s a static page that hasn’t been updated for several years.  Just a dumping ground for stuff that didn’t merit a formal post really.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/p/experiments.html

So here’s another local tradition to do with extreme climatic conditions: the musharabiya.  We had a project with a large number of these, different sizes but all the same basic pattern.  You can make an array, no problem, but what about the intermediate sizes.  So this solution uses a void to cut the edges of an oversized array.  It’s a crude solution in a way, but it did its job.  I used a sweep for the module, with a profile and a very short path to control the depth.  Apart from making it easy to swap in new patterns, this defeats the tendency of extrusions to distort when the reference planes controlling the void move across to form different sizes.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2010/12/screen-for-all-seasons.html

Soft furnishings are a recurrent them in my posts.  It’s not what Revit was designed for, but if you have a rendering engine, and if the idea of BIM is to provide continuity from concept design all the way to facilities management, surely you need a way to represent pillows and curtains and bedspreads in a semi-convincing manner.  So this post applies the “lofted series of parametric profiles” idea (probably derived from Zach) for the first time.  Pillows of various sizes and shapes.  A weird looking building with triangular windows, and of course … a toilet.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/03/pillow-talk.html

Another early attempt at adaptive form.  This was one that I shared with the office via my “Revit Lunch” series, which flourished for a while and died a death.  I guess I felt that support from senior management was somewhat lukewarm.  Anyone else ever had that feeling?

There is a curtain system by face, based on an in-place surface which adapts to changes in the support structure: 3 instances of a family with a radial array of 4 poles & some parametric control.  Crude stumblings in retrospect, trying to achieve something fluid, dynamic, exciting that lay just beyond my grasp.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/04/greenhouse-gas.html

Another Revit lunch.  I was following the metaphor of “starter, main course & dessert” which I thought was rather effective.  Show off a couple of news items while the audience is settling down.  Then do something substantive for say 20 minutes.  Finish with e.g. a short video from the web.  The main course here was a Greek temple that I had modelled one weekend.  The post itself is mainly about the temple, but makes reference to my Revit Lunch sessions.  And thereby I hoped to get Revit users at the office to follow my blog, because it would contain the write-ups of Revit Lunch sessions.  Good ideas don’t always survive the ruthlessness of natural selection.


Of course there is the first stirrings here of Project Soane and Project Notre Dame, but how could I have predicted that?


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/04/lunch-with-gods.html

Stairs are a constant challenge.  They have improved, but nobody is really fully satisfied with what this tool can do.  It could be easier, and it could be more versatile.  Creative solutions will continue to be devised.  Here are a couple of mine.  Another weekend striving to improve my competence and to explore the “way we build” at the same time.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/04/snakes-ladders.html

Cars.  These days, if you have Enscape3d, there are some excellent vehicles available for Revit.  Other solutions over the years have included CAD mesh files that look awful in shaded views but render quite well.  RPC (Archvision) is another solution, and you get a few free starters with Revit.  This was my attempt to create a quick “architects sketch” of a generic family saloon.  It’s a modelling challenge for its own sake, with a practical end in mind.  I though it was quite cute, in the way that quick sketches by architects often are.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/05/drive-my-car.html

There was this thing called 123D.  It was one of those freebies that Autodesk put out from time to time to test the waters.  I saw it as a possible tool for creating acceptable geometry for sanitary ware items.  It’s been a longstanding gripe of mine how awful most of the bathroom content is (getting better gradually) Either you get clunky shapes with sharp edges, or you get mesh objects with horrific triangulation. (I have a solution for that now)  So this was a successful experiment, but I never took it further, and 123D expired.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/05/spoilt-for-choice.html

Around this time I was acting as host to CPD sessions by suppliers who gave a free lunch to 20 or 30 attendees who listened to a talk of some kind, supposedly with educational content.  Current management doesn’t see the value in this, so it’s fallen away.  But for a couple of years it provided a way for me to interact with the supply side of our industry, many of whom knew little about BIM.  I learned a lot, and my ideas about how to integrate suppliers and manufacturers into the BIM venture have evolved as a result.  Here is an attempt to develop a 3d family for movement joint products.  It’s a line-based family with embedded detail items.  I’m not sure anyone has taken this up in a serious way.  We’ve never really used it in practice.  Maybe one day everyone will incorporate this level of detail/information in their model.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/06/joint-ownership.html

My first pillow was a) in the mass category b) too regular to pass as a real pillow.  I came up with a vanilla Revit version and then stumbled across a solution that was still resizable but featured a kink along the two short sides. I love these simple little tweaks that fool the eye into seeing more complexity than is really there.  Once our brain gets the right kinds of clue, we hallucinate the rest from previous experience.  Magic … or as close as you can get.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/flex-that-cushion.html

Reference planes.  Classic love-hate relationship.  They repay the effort of learning to use them effectively.  The deck chair was an excellent learning exercise for me, and I also think it’s a really cute object.  Haven’t had much opportunity to use it though.  All the same, the feeling I get now, looking back at the first 12 posts on my blog, is that I was starting to find my voice.  The posts are growing in confidence, and the major themes have been laid down.


https://grevity.blogspot.com/2011/09/reference-plane-heaven.htm

So that’s the first phase of my blog, leading up to my first Pumpkin competition.  Towards the end of this period I met Tim Bates from Newforma.  He found my blog interesting and passed it on to Dave Light who gave me a brief mention.  Up to that point I had been lying low, with very little traffic, but the timing couldn’t have been better.  I had no idea that the pumpkin adventures were about to begin, or just how crazy an obsession they would become. Amazingly, an audience popped up, just at the right moment, and this blog has been a central reference point in my life ever since.