LUNCH WITH THE GODS

Earlier this year I started a thing called the "Revit Lunch"  We have a resource area at GAJ where presentations & design reviews take place, which doubles up as a kind of canteen space.

My idea was to give weekly presentations aimed at intermediate level users who want to get deeper into family creation, or conceptual massing, or whatever.  I break it down into Starter, Main Course & Dessert.  Maybe start with a slide-show loop and finish with a video clip.  One time we had Zach Kron's icing the donut clip for dessert, which seemed appropriate.

First main course was a gentle introduction to wall-hosted families.  Cut openings versus void extrusions & sweeps. Locking geometry to reference planes.  I dropped this image into the server library to remind people what we covered.

The weekend before lunch 03 I got inspired to model a Greek temple.  Started out as "how to tackle the fluting on a doric column" Ended up as what used to be called the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, a Greek colony in Southern Italy.

I wanted the fluting to be based on a profile that could be scaled parametrically, but couldn't get this to work.  Had to be content with manually scaling the sketches in family editor.  It's a pretty fast way to make doric columns of different sizes & proportions.  One day I'll have another go at making it all operate from 2 or 3 parameters in the family type dialogue.

This was just a quick weekend exercise, but it demonstrated to me once more the depth of insight that building a Revit model of something brings.



I think it should be a mandatory part of all History of Architecture courses.  Work in groups, collect lots of reference images for the building, divide up the family creation work, assemble your model.  Then each student gets to set up views, renderings, text & analysis on a single A1 sheet to convey the insight they gained into the chosen building.

If every school of Architecture around the world was doing this, and they posted all the results on open websites, think what a resource that would become.  Kind of Great Buildings.com on steroids.

SNAKES & LADDERS

So one of the April fools gags this year was about the Stairs & Railings tools that have once more failed to arrive with the new release of Revit.  Everyone moans about Stairs & Railings and they can be a pain, but the more you use the existing tools the more you find you can achieve.

Over the christmas break I set myself a couple of staircase challenges.  No 1 was the helical stair under the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre.  Three images above are Realistic, Reference Photo & Rendered. 

The railings are the key here.  The round handrail is easy stuff, The glass is a continuous rail with joints formed by balusters that are just slivers of glass lying in the same plane. Gives the effect of a series of curved panels with very little effort.  The triangular undercarriage of the stair is also created as a railing with a custom profile.

Final sheet is from our office server Revit library.  I've created a "collections" folder with a file for each category of families, and I just drop in there whatever I make or find so people can copy/paste whatever they find useful.  It's a lot more user-friendly than browsing through folders opening & closing families till you find the one you want.  I also means I can set up explanatory sheets like the one above, or maybe a sheet on office standard naming conventions.

Flushed with success I went on to tackle and open-tread steel staircase which also uses more than one railing.  The brackets are balusters in a baluster-per-tread railing which is separate from the "real" railing.  The steel channel stringers are part of this second railing.  Used a custom nosing for the open treads and that was it.  Will get round to rendering this one day.

In conclusion though, better stairs & railings are still high up on my wish-list.  Next year maybe ...

PILLOW TALK

If only ...

How often does Revit get me saying that ?  Its such a brilliant way of working, you can't help wanting to do more, to do everything the Revit way.  So if only.  If only we could use the conceptual massing tools to make furniture, or sanitary fittings, or pillows for example.

So how would I set about it ?  Could start with a profile, model lines drawn in a generic model family. Something like this.

Bring this into a massing family and place several instance of different sizes on reference places.  Use these to make a form.  Not a bad approximation to a pillow.

Using linked instance parameters, we can vary the shape, scale it up and down, even swap in different profiles.  An elipse for example. Some simple formulas will allow us to keep user parameters down to a minimum

Small versions could be pillows, cushions, various household items.

Larger versions can be panellised to make buildings, perhaps an arena ...

or maybe a flying saucer or two.   All variations on the same basic family.  Just tweaking the instance parameters will scale it up or down by a factor of 10 or 100, convert a rectangle into an ellipse, squeeze out a flange in the middle ...

Not too hard to imagine making better sanitary fittings this way.  In fact it turns out that you can do the same kind of form making with generic model profiles in an adaptive family.  Now adaptive families can be plumbing fixtures, and they can be shared, so by hosting them in a mass you can get them into a project and schedule them.  I made a version of Duravit's Puravida WC this way using a D shaped profile with 3 instance parameters to create 4 different forms, 2 for the bowl and 1 each for the seat & the cistern.  Loaded in a standard family that I use for flush buttons and the result is a better WC than I have been able to make before using native Revit modelling tools.

With Revit 2012 offering direct placement of adaptive components it will be no longer necessary to host my WC in a mass.  Now this is probably not what the factory had in mind for adaptive components, but it's about time we had some decent sanitary ware, so why not ?