The Oxford Dictionary defines the term, symmetry as: “The quality of being made up of exactly
similar parts facing each other or around an axis”. Symmetry forms such a
big part of our daily lives that we rarely recognize or appreciate it anymore.
This entry has been inspired by a recent post on Boredpanda, and
will illustrate 3 examples of symmetry in that can be found in architecture and
engineering (Even though a bit of Photoshop may be involved).
Each example was both easy and somewhat difficult to
recreate in Revit. Sometimes the modelling methods needed to be revisited, and
other times quite a few renders were needed to get a mildly acceptable result.
Note: Renders were created through Revit as well as by using Enscape.
Buildings were created through the Conceptual
Massing Environment, with walls and roofs applied to these mass faces. Curtain
wall storefronts were added to the atrium. The biggest challenge was to
“accurately” locate the perspective view from the entrance level looking up.
Definitely not as simple as one would think!
I am however quite satisfied with
the in-Revit conceptual render, using NVIDIA Mental Ray with custom render
settings:
I really enjoyed toying with
Enscape for this render, too. I ended up saving 14 images, of which I couldn’t
decide which to post. So, to be fair, below is the first attempt
Floors, slab edges, split
surfaces, railings and a generic model family were used to recreate the
illuminated bridge. The generic model family’s material was set to be
self-illuminating. The squares were arrayed, ungrouped and rotated in 15 degree
increments.
Replicating the image to be as close to the
original source took some time. Quite a number of in-Revit renders took place
to get the illumination colour intensity and diffusion to be “acceptable”.
I do however prefer the Enscape render. It
might just be because I am a huge TRON fan!
Our last example is of a non-parametric steel structure. I decided to
create this as an in-place model, as by then, it was 3AM in the morning
already. Sweeps and Extrusions were used.
The Revit Render result was quite dull, but I am sure with a
few more tweaks, it would have looked much better. I just didn’t have enough
time.
A subsequent goal of this blog post, is to illustrate the
user-friendliness and quality of the Enscape software – Instant Immersive
Visualization. Sometimes one simply does not have time to spare to run a number
of renders for a presentation, making subtle changes to each render as you go
along. This is where Enscape definitely fits the bill.
