WHEN IS A PUMPKIN NOT A PUMPKIN

This is post no 2 of our competition entry.  Zach is watching, so behave yourselves.

Pumpkins are well know for their metamorphic properties as Cinderella would be quick to point out.  I haven't quite got the coach & horses down yet (still looking for some suitable mice) but the transformations are proceeding apace.

First off was the 20 volute column. Turned out to be quite easy to filter-select and copy-rotate elements to double up the number of points and parameters in my profile.  Had to dissolve it first of course and later on select the points, 3 at a time, to do the spline-by-points trick again for each of the 20 volutes.

After that it's a question of creating a parameter for the profile name, so we can choose what to use for base, mid and top.  Then associate the radii with parameters R1, R2 & R3 so that I can control the size of each profile from within the host family. Hey presto you get a really nice scaleable Doric column shaft from the same family that made the original pumpkin,

So far this has been done in a Generic Model "Adaptive" family.  So it can be converted to another category, EXCEPT for mass.  To prove the scaleability I set up another version of the family by loading my profile into a conceptual mass family template. Jack this up to 75 metres high with a base diameter of 10m and we're away.

The base was modelled in-place, mass-floors put in, and then straight on to wall-by-face.  Click, click, click go my 20 volutes.  I tested out changing the size of the mass family and using "update to face", works fine.  Windows go in, copy them up from floor to floor, no problem.  Half an hour and I have the basic shell of the building done.

The two doric columns at the main entrance are metamorphosed pumpkins, 3 times over.  Confused ?  Simple.  One for the shaft, one for the echinuus (based on a cirular profile) and one for the abacus (square profile)

So by now I have 4 different profile families loaded into my pumpkin host, and by playing with parameters I can create all kinds of forms, including re-entrant shapes. And pumpkins of course.

How about egg-cups, golf tees, crown-of-thorn cathedrals ... lots of possibilities here

I'll finish with a render of the Tribune scheme by Loos. The windows are not quite right yet, and there should be 28 volutes, not 20. Seems he cheated a bit to get the plan to work. (been there) 

I guess you could count the windows as "carving", but I'd like to do some parametric voids that do clever stuff. Any ideas ?

If you want to contribute, you can pick up my parametric doric pumpkin family form here.
Anything half decent will get included in my next post.

5 stack pumpkins 2011

Actually this is the 5 profile version, opens with Revit 2011 & later.  More about that tomorrow.

EXPLORING PUMPKINLAND

I was going to leave this to the last minute so as nobody else could pinch my ideas, then I thought "why are you doing that ?  If you really believe in open collaboration you need to put it out there and see what happens"  After all this is inspired by Wil from the land of windmills & legalised marijuana who read my "Lunch with the Gods" piece, and took up the challenge to make a parametric Doric column.

I opened this up on Thursday and was truly inspired.  Lots of parameters whose names obviously make sense in Dutch, and formulas that I only half understood, but the result is a doric column shaft that you can resize at Will (as it were)  A great big thankyou to Wil for contributing a family to the Shades of Grey community.

Now it so happened that Wil mentioned that he got part of his inspiration from Zach Kron's blog.  Just about everybody who uses the conceptual massing tools has been inspired by Zach, but this jogged my memory that the 3rd annual pumpkin carving competition is imminent. 

Lightbulb moment.  Wouldn't take much tweaking to make a parametric doric column morph into a pumpkin.

So on Thursday afternoon (in between Revit training with Ignacio, John & cezar and making a door family for Sabu)  I played out another hunch.  David Light posted a while back about using profiles in conceptual massing.  Why couldn't I convert Wil's family into mass profiles nested inside an adaptive component.  3 Profiles with variable radii, (placed on 3 separate workplanes) would surely give me what I was looking for.

The first attempt didn't work because Will had used reference lines (very cleverly) to create the rig for his profile.  That's OK as long as the profiles are created directly in the family. You can select the lines you want to use to create a form. But I thought it would be more elegant to nest the profiles.  Problem is Revit tries to create a form from every line or reference line within that nested family.  Turns out though that you can host points on reference PLANES, and still set up parameters to control them.  You need quite a lot of dimensions, (and to tab them to snap to your points), but it works fine.

HINT: use a mass family to create the profile.  Don't try to use the profile family template like you would for railings etc.  The 3 profiles give me nice entasis on the columns, and I can reverse this to create a stalk for the tops of my pumpkins.  By using a "bulge factor" to set the ratio between the two imaginary diameters, I can reverse the curve from convex to concave.  A ratio of 1.2 is concave and 0.8 is convex.  You are just playing with whether the points for the centres of the curves are inside or outside the end points.

For a proper Doric column you need 20 volutes, but I wanted to test my idea first so I set up 10, which is more realistic for a pumpkin in any case.  So there are still a few days to go before Halloween.  Where should I take this next ?  I am thinking ... OK we have an interesting jump in scale from the pumpkin you buy at the corner shop, via giant competition pumpkin, small column in your garden ... whopping big column at Paestum.  Why not jump again ?  Massing is supposed to be a framework for early design of multi-storey buildings, so why not do Adolf Loos' 1922 entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition.

Any other ideas out there ?  We could have a competition within a competition.  How about the carving aspect ?  I haven't done any of that yet, apart from the Cheshire cat grins I faked in photoshop.  There must be a cool way to cut parametric voids into my family.  Remember it would need to scale up with the rest of the family somehow.

HITTING THE CEILING

Got a comment from Julio a couple of weeks ago asking how to make a recessed lighting cornice.  See   beam-me-up-scotty

I thought this would making an interesting little tutorial for my guys and featured it in one of my Revit Lunches, but since then things have been a bit crazy and I forgot all about it.  Stumbled across it again today by accident and decided to turn it into a post.  Bit rough and ready, but hope some of you find it useful.

This is the (almost) finished article.  Should put another light fitting in there to kill the dark spot, but I need to go home to get some sleep so I'm not going to re-make this image today. 

This is a ceiling hosted family so go to new family, & choose the ceiling hosted template.

Set up some reference planes with equalised width & length parameters.  Create an "opening" and lock the sketch to the ref planes.  Might as well make width & length instance parameters so you can easily stretch it to different sizes. 

Next we need an extrusion for the sides.  This will be a rectangle locked to the same reference planes and "copy-offset" by say 20mm so that we get a hollow box around the edges of the opening.

Go into a side view and create reference planes for the height of the box and the thickness of the upper ceiling board.  Then back to plan view to create another extrusion for the upper ceiling.

By now you have 3 objects all locked to the same reference planes. You want them all locked to the reference planes, and not to each other, otherwise you might get that nasty message saying you have a circular chain of references.

A simple way to handle this, is to hide the other objects with the sunglasses (temporary hide) tool while drawing the sketch for each extrusion. That way you can only see the reference planes so you know that is what you are snapping to.

Now we want a cornice moulding.  This is a sweep and the path is locked to those same 4 reference planes once again.  The profile could be sketched directly in the family, but I prefer to load a profile family.  That way I can set a parameter to choose between loaded profiles.  Now the family is very versatile within the project.  You can set up types with different heights and moulding profiles, and instances with different dimensions in plan.

This is one profile that I created which can be resized using just 2 parameters.  Check out the visual below for how this is achieved.

The lights can be loaded directly in the project and placed behind the cornice.  I used the "M_Uplight - Strip" family supplied with Revit Architecture.  One last tip.  To set the equality constraints on the ogee curve in the profile family, you need to "tab select" to persuade the dimension tool to pick up the end point of the arc.

Download the family here :   coffer family