Friday, July 19, 2013

Scaling families – #empirebim

image

It seems very trendy to scale families these days! As I missed out on some of Marcello’s RTC Revit hacks this year, this is homage to what he & others like Kelvin Tam are doing. So as others have shown, I have various nested generic model families, dropped them into a plant family template. This family is then nested into another plant family. This is then placed into a project. Using the height parameter in the family, changing this, scales the family.

image

So what about this for a complete twist; a curtain wall At-At…..

image

image

So it easy to achieve this. Just create the family using the nested plant family approach previously described in both Marcello’s & Kelvins Blog posts . Next start a new curtain wall panel family. Then load your plant family into the curtain wall panel. Lock & align it to the reference level. Then create a dimension between the top & bottom reference planes in an elevation view. As indicated in the image below.

image

Then select that dimension & turn it into a instance based reporting parameter.

image

Finally link this report parameter to the height parameter in the nested plant family.

image

Save your family & load him into a new project. Draw yourself a new piece of curtain wall. The key component here is to set the divisions of the curtain wall to be by number in the type properties of the curtain wall, certainly during the test process. Also, set the curtain wall panel type to be your newly loaded curtain wall panel.

image

Your panels will then display in the the curtain wall. Select the curtain wall & alter the vertical grid & horizontal grid number as required to increase the number of panels.

image

You will be able to do other cool things if you manually divide the curtain wall.

image

No comments :