Much fun! Some interesting pointers from Phil & Zach on my ellipse blog post from last week. Check em out here….
http://www.architecture-tech.com/2011/08/creating-elliptical-walls-in-revit.html
http://buildz.blogspot.com/2011/08/self-rationalizing-ellipse.html
Combing pebbles & ellipses!
Be sure to checkout Zach Kronz cool post of creating pebbles forms in either Revit or Vasari…..nice.
http://buildz.blogspot.com/2011/08/pebbles-bam-bam.html
Yep, that's right, this is Revit…..
Elliptical elements have always been rather awkward to create in Revit. For instance you can’t create an elliptical wall without first creating an elliptical mass & then performing the wall by face function.
Whilst you could easily argue that ellipses are the scourge of architectural design, cause they are a pain in the arse to set out. Nether the less they are an important form to any designer or interior designer. Anyway, I was having some fun the other day looking at the best way to divide an ellipse into a number of equal segments. My old school CAD head kicked in, draw the ellipse, draw a series of circles on the perimeter on the ellipse then draw lines from the centroid of the ellipse to intersect with the ellipse of the circle. So I started in a new Revit project, followed the above procedure only to find I could not snap a line to the intersection of the ellipse & the circle??? Hmmm this seemed a bit odd….a bug may be? Anyway, I jumped over to the conceptual massing environment ( CDE in project as well as a family), did the same exercise & everything worked peachy here!
I don’t know what the project environment has against ellipses, but it needs to get learn from its sibling conceptual mass environment & get with the kids! One for the development team me thinks.
This may seem rather obvious to the seasoned Revit user; but for the new kids on the block, when using voids to cut massing geometry in Revit, sometimes you need to think a little differently. The process of using voids to cut geometry can be a bit confusing. This is especially so, since the way voids cut in the conceptual massing tools is a little different compared with voids in say the in-place editor or family editor.. For instance, take a look at the image below. This was created by generating a freeform surface using the massing tools….then roof by face to generate the actual geometry for the roof.…it looks reasonably straight forward to achieve, but you need more then two voids to cut the initial massing surface.
Let me explain in more detail…..
So the surface was created using the massing tool, which consisted of a series of spline reference lines, then a surface generated between the reference lines. As indicated below.
Next up, a inner boundary & a outer boundary of reference lines where sketched. These will be used to form the voids which will cut the surface.
Now the natural logic here is to also create a large rectangle to go beyond the surface, like this…..
However, this is not going to work for us, because if you try & build the void, from the rectangle & trimming reference lines you are going to get the dreaded “Unable to create form element error”.
Instead, you need to create two voids from reference lines to cut away the excess surface. With a reference lines configuration like this.
The image below, hopefully explains it a little better.
All we then need is to create a void from the inner reference lines to cut the opening & we are good to go.
You may need to use the Cut Geometry tool to force the cutting.
I hope the above makes sense, I guess I should really do a youtube video to explain it in more detail, but this should at least give you some useful guidance.
Be sure to check out Luke Johnson tip on saving in-place families!!! Nice one.
http://whatrevitwants.blogspot.com/2011/07/save-in-place-family-as-rfa-for-use-in.html
Thought you might be interested in reading Alan Wooldridges article on Revit System Wall for UK localisation.
http://cadalot-revitlearningcurve.blogspot.com/2011/07/revit-system-wall-families-uk.html
Ralph Pullinger (Autodesk) and Alan are looking at developing a UK Based System Wall Family Template, however they require your help. In order to achieve this they will need a little background information and briefing on the kind of information we need to included. Pop over to Alans blog & provide some input.
