JUST PARKING

I'm having difficulty finishing off my posts at the moment.  Lots of stuff that is almost ready, but between catching flu and multiple deadlines at GAJ I can't quite get them on to the blog.  So this is a quick one based on something I've cobbled together recently.

This is the bog-standard parking bay that comes with Revit, but I've added in the simplified car family that I made a while back, plus a wheelchair symbol, given these visibility controls (instance parameters) and also linked the car material to an instance parameter.

All simple stuff, but it gives you a parking bay that schedules in a completely regular way, while having a more random look in 3d and on plan ... like real parking bays.  Recently I added an extrusion to represent the paving surface in a masterplanning study.  This is OK, but it doesn't respond to the angle parameters built in to the original family at the moment.

Judicious use of visibility controls at coarse, medium and fine scales can allow you to vary the amount of information shown in plan views eg. no car at all, car outline, detailed car.

WINNING WAYS

Exciting day today.  I treated all the Revit Lunch regulars at GAJ to Biryani in place of my usual Revit presentation ... this to celebrate winning the prestigious Pumpkin Award.  Needless to say I am indebted to all the Revit enthusiasts here at Godwin Austen Johnson who have supported & motivated me over the past 6 years or so,  not least Brian Johnson himself.

A great big thankyou to Zach for hosting the competition and for running his inspirational BUILDZ website.  FOLLOW THIS LINK

The other two winners were serious pieces of work and I am honoured to be in such company.  I took the "Goodest" award, the other 2 categories being "Baddest" & "Most Parametric".  Lots of high-powered formulas on show, not to mention gnashing of teeth.  Well done guys.

You can see my entry by reading the 6 previous posts in this blog.  I went through quite a journey of exploration, reflecting on the digital tools we use to design buildings today and how they present us with many of the same issues that architects have been pondering for generations: order & disorder, image & reality ... but read the posts.

Eid Al Adha coming up here in the UAE, so that will give me time to prepare some more blog posts.  Lots of ideas bubbling around in what's left of my brain cells, so come back and have a look about 8 days from now.

PUMPKIN POSTSCRIPT

So what have I learnt ?

 A lot ... never imagined where this jounrney would take me.  But let's stand back and reflect.  The basic premise of this exercise has been that pumpkins and doric columns can be treated as homologous structures.

METAMORPHOSIS
This is the essence of parametric families.  I could easily now make a family that has 2 types: a pumpkin and a doric column

Not something I would use directly, but I suspect that the techniques developed here will have many applications. Plumbing & furniture families that can morph into different sizes and shapes perhaps. 

SIMPLICITY (BOILING DOWN THE PUMPKIN)
I tried hard to simplify and organise my dialogue boxes, but I think they would still be pretty scary to the average user.  What should the Type Parameters Dialogue for a Doric Column family look like in an ideal world ?

BIOMIMICRY
Revit is good at making shapes based on rules.  But we also need to deal with the other end of the spectrum : soft, lumpy, irregular things.  You can use an FBX workflow into Max.  You can fake stuff in photoshop.  But you can also introduce some irregularity of shape & texture in Revit.  There is a long way to go though.  Think thatched roofing, & rough stone walling.  Not easy to do convincingly in Revit.

FILES
So it's been a long week and here in the desert our weekend started 5 hours ago.  Time to upload what I have and leave the rest to Zach.  File is  HERE .   2012 version this time.  Contents pictured below.