Friday, February 19, 2010

Pointless stuff, Offset parameter in Revit massing

This article builds on recent posts on the use of Reference point, when working in the conceptual massing environment. The more I use them, the more I realise how powerful they are.

If you place a “Reference Point” and take a look at its Instance properties, you will discover its a System Family.

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You can control how it displays in the conceptual environment; for instance you can change the Show Reference Planes Parameter. You are provided with three options “Never”, “When Selected”,  “Always”. You can also control its visibility by enabling or disabling the “Visible” parameter.

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Under the Graphics section we can say whether its “Driven by Host” and you will also see an “Offset” parameter. We can also name the point. Lets focus on the “Offset” parameter.

We can drive the offset parameter, thus moving the point by adding a figure into the “Value”. This offset distance is based on the plane the point was originally position on. So if we add 1m into the offset it will move the point 1m in a “Z” direction, assuming it was position on the X,Y plane.

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Now the smart thing here is because the point has a total of three planes, XY, ZY,ZX, we can also place points on these planes and drive points using there offset from the planes.

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Take a look at the video which should hopefully explain this in more detail.

3 comments :

matt jezyk said...

ahh, grasshopper. your learning is now quite advanced. great to see people digging deeper into the powers of our new points and parametric families!

Zach Kron said...

Hey David,
Thanks so much for posting this stuff. There are a lot of basic conditions in modeling in the Mass environement that, once understood, open up whole new areas of parametric design for Revit users. Point and point parameters are definitely the backbone of this way of working.

Zach Kron said...
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