Ferrari World Abu Dhabi in Revit

The other day I stumbled upon the Ferrari World Building by Benoy Architects.  Like so many other buildings which have been the basis for this blog, it captured my imagination because i wanted to know how you would generate and refine such a form in Revit's conceptual massing environment.

First thing i did was to start in sketchup so i could grab some key dimensions to start with:

The i recreated the circles and key curves in a conceptual mass family.  A 3 point curve sets up the pincers.  Points offset from a pair of constrained reference points along the bisector set up a curve for the broad side of the form.

A key element of success in generating a form like this is realizing that it is essentially a 60 degree swept profile with cutaways which is then mirrored around a circle.  If you make 1/6th of the form, you've pretty much got the whole thing.
So with these key curves done, i generated the voids to cut the skin:

I found some design information about how the skin profile was generated:

It would have been easier if i'd had a CAD file but approximating the curve wasn't that hard:

Then sweep and cutaway the excess so you only get the 60 degree segment:

Tweaking the parameters which control the broad curve, we can finesse the form a bit:

Cute.  But looking back at the picture, i can see that the center is a different material and there is a silver band along the broad edge.  This requires offsetting a second set of points from the ones which drive the broad curve.

In the end, i had to take the base skin and cut it up into 3 different parts for the 3 materials of the form.  These 3 then get nested into a single family which can still be massaged:

Then brought into the project environment, mirrored around and voila!

I could have gone much further with the parameters to control many more aspects of the form, but I figure this wasn't bad for a couple of hours work.  Fun stuff.

Link to the file:

Ferrari World.RVT

Twitter Ass(ault)

Do you follow @Autodesk?

Now would be a great time to start.  Later this week they are letting me pump a bunch of pictures through their twitterfeed for a day.

Should be good fun.... I guarantee.... @bimtroublemaker

TOP 10: Secrets to Successfully Integrating BIM...

Like many BIM professionals, i get bulk mailers about BIM news.  I usually give them a cursory glance, but rarely does anything really carry any weight or grab my attention.I met the author, Robert Mencarini, at an Autodesk Revit Gunslinger event several years ago.  I remembered him because the dude was ON FIRE!  Really passionate fellow.  I was interested in what he had to say and i wasn't dissapointed.

"BIM is both a technology and a process. This forces firms to reevaluate how they produce their design services. The winners will differentiate themselves by focusing on producing services that their clients expect, such as those that impact time, money and quality."

Though the article is supposedly focused on health care facilities, I think he did a great job of clearly and concisely expressing the principles behind the 3d sandbox we are all playing in. Here is the Article:

http://www.healthcareglobal.com/hospitals/1675/TOP-10:-Secrets-to-Successfully-Integrating-BIM-in-Hospital-Construction

DYNAMO Tutorial Presentation

For the past year, i have been running an informal Advanced Revit training series in Singapore.  Last week I walked through a couple of exercises in DYNAMO to illustrate some key functions of the platform.

I figured i would make the materials generally available if anyone else wants to take a stab at it.  Maybe a good start to build a training session.  It took about 90 minutes to get through the material.  A guy on the development team came and he thought it was pretty cool.

You can download the dataset and presentation here:

FARTS 09 - DYNAMO Dataset

Have a nice day.

Practical Dynamo - Excel Linking 2: Keeping Track of Your Families

There is an advantage to living in a small city/country with a disproportionately large contingent of ADSK employees: I have great access to the development team!

In my last blog post, I pointed out how the list of values for the selected families were not in alphabetical order:

This was because the instances were sorted in order according the GUID:

Without taking the GUID into account, it was impossible to map data from excel back to the appropriate family instance.  If i sorted the data in Excel, I would end up with results like this one:

Not quite hitting the mark in terms of "Data Integrity".  What i needed was a way to export the data, taking the GUID into account, and then be able to map values to the right object on the return trip.

I got in touch with my friends Sharad and Ritesh at ADSK in Singapore and told them about my problem.  These guys love both a challenge and customer feedback; its a match made in heaven because i am a man with problems.

Explaining my dilemma to them, they knew exactly how to solve it and we developed these 2 scripts.

THE OUTPUT:

I included the UniqueID into the index stack:

Making my excel spreadsheet look like this:

THE INPUT:

Now when i bring the data back from Excel, there is the index for my elements included.  The order of the GUIDs will inherently match the order of the lists for the other data indices.

What the boys at ADSK told me about was a command ElementSelector.ByUniqueID.  They made me create a code block like you see above and then plug that into SetParameterByName node.  Now DYNAMO will pick my instances by name and in the correct sorted order.

And I am whole again!

The ElementSelector.ByUniqueID is a "hidden command" apparently.  It was in the user menu previously, but the team took it out because they couldn't think of a scenario where it would be useful!  BIMTroublemaker to the rescue!

This whole process makes me happy like ordering from the secret menu at In & Out!

Practical Dynamo - Excel Linking

At some time or another, I think we have all grumbled about Revit's lack of interest in communicating with Excel.  The minions of Bass implored us "LINK TO MS/ACCESS!!!"

yeah right....

In response many of us have expended resources on bi-directional excel links using the API.  Sometimes purchased, sometimes internally developed, but there was always a substantial cost involved.

Then along comes DYNAMO.  There is not shortage of pretty pictures of its iterative design capabilities but i'm more practically minded. I realized in an instant that this was the tool that could give me an on the fly, bi-directional excel link... if only i could figure it out.

I've taken some babysteps and i thought i would share.  There is a hardcore group of guys using it, but i am doing my part to spread the word to the mass market.

Here's what i did, starting with a field of orbs.

I've given all the orbs instance marks of AAA to KKK.  My goal is to export the data to excel, add a column in excel with new data, and finally port the new data it back into the "Comments" field.

Getting the Data Out

First thing was to make a new DYNAMO file that I called "Excel Out.dyn"

I'll work from Left to right through the steps

Family Types - Identifies the family type within the Revit model you would like to work with.
All Elements of Family Type - Tells DYNAMO to select them.

Element.GetParameterValueByName - Returns a list of the values for a given parameter within the selected families.
String - Literally a string of characters.  In this case, the name of the parameter i want DYNAMO to get for me.  This kind of work is case-sensitive.

Watch - These are the boxes that will let us see what DYNAMO is doing.  The box on the left shows me the list of values in the "Mark" parameter.  Its not in alphabetical order and I don't care.  On the right is the list of values for the "Comments" parameter.  Its empty, which is accurate.

List.Create - Now i am compiling the data i've culled. index0 refers to the list of values from the "Mark" parameter, index1 refers to the list of values from the "Comments" parameter.

List.Transpose - The previous lists were formatted as columns, however when Dynamo and Excel talk, the data should be formatted by row.  This button reorganizes the data.  Now i have a list for each family instance where item [0] = the "Mark" parameter and item[1] = the "Comments" parameter.

Excel.Write - This is the node which will open an excel file and write to it, but it needs some instructions
File Path - Tells DYNAMO where to find the .XLSX file
sheetName - Must indicate which sheet within the workbook is to be referenced.  I use a text string to indicate
startRow & startCol - Tells DYNAMO where to start reading the spreadsheet
data - Is looking for the lists we created earlier

I hit the RUN button in the bottom left corner.  It thinks for a second then i open my excel file and i have this:

Perfect.  My exported values are in the first column, the second column is blank as anticipated.  For now i am still ignoring the lack of alphabetical order.

Getting the Data In

Using the CONCATENATE function in excel, i went ahead and added the data in column b that i will pump back into my families.

For this part, I made a new DYNAMO file that I called "Excel In.dyn"

Again I'll work from left to right:

File Path - Gets the Excel file
String - text string to indicate which worksheet
Excel.Read - The node which tells DYNAMO to open the file and read it
Watch - Showing me what it comes up with.  Notice how it has made me a series of lists showing what was in each row.

List.Transpose - This is what turns the list of data by rows into a list of data by columns
List.GetItemAtIndex - This is an instruction to pull a particular list out of the list of lists.
Number - "1" pointed at the "index" slot tells it that i want list [1]
Watch - You can see that it has isolated the data i want

Element.SetParameterByName - This is where the magic happens.  This is the node which will write to data to the parameters in your families.  Of course it needs some information.
In the element slot we get:
Family Types - Indicates the families available in the model.
All Elements of Family Type - Tells it to select the indicated family.
In the parameterName slot i use a String node to indicate the parameter i want to write, "Comments".
The value slot links back to me previously isolated data.

I hit the RUN button again and success!

There is still some ways to go with this but i am really happy that i have made some headway.  More help is available here from guys who are lightyears ahead of me:

http://dynamobim.org/