Scaling families – #empirebim

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

https://sketchfab.com

Sketchfab is a lot of fun. Its a hosting service for sharing & embedding 3d models on the web. Using webGL through a suitable browser, you can post 3d models online & share them with others. Sketchfab describe themselves as wanting to be the Youtube for 3D content. Its worth a look & good fun. It supports up to 27 native formats & I hear a rumour a Revit exporter might be on the way.

Check it out http://sketchfab.com/

This was little bit of experimentation: Vasari shuttle, exported to DWF & then uploaded to sketchfab

imperial shuttle(click to view in 3D)

More AT-AT fun

So I have been fooling around with FormIT a lot, gives me something to do & actually is a great de-stress app! So over the weekend I knocked this little beauty up.

Oh yes, another couple of AT-AT's, this time modelled in FormIT. This got me thinking even more, if I sync'd these to my Autodesk 360 account, this will get converted to a SAT file. At which stage I could then download the SAT file into Revit 2014 & try the new explode feature on the SAT. Apart from a rather cranky scale, the SAT file seem to import fine, however, I was missing some faces.

When I tried to the explode to objects, that wasn’t so successful as most of the geometry disappeared! However, a quick import into AutoCAD yielded more promising results.

Then I tried an IGS out from AutoCAD, then an IGS into Rhino 5. BTW by no means am I a Rhino expert! Again, a lot faces again seemed to be missing, so some work still to do to get this workflow to be completely fluid. The AT-AT was a very complex form & I suspect there is some fine tuning which needs to happen in the cloud conversion process; certainly on more basic forms this will work as you can see from this example.

Vasari – BIMstore Special Editions

I have been asked on a number occasions if I could share a copies of some my Star Wars Revit & Vasari families. Well I shared my Imperial Shuttle with the guys over at BIMstore, so get ya copy there! Be sure to check out the parameter names!

http://www.bimstore.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=142:the-bim-geek&catid=49:the-bimstore-blog&Itemid=297

What a piece of junk!

Still working progress, but I thought I’d share. Why Vasari & Revit is my hobby as much as its my job!