Awesome Entourage in 5 Seconds

“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.” — Roald Dahl

The value of previous Autodesk University classes are highly underrated and underused. I found a AU 2016 class by Marcello Sgambelluri called: "More Families in Motion: New and Exciting Methods That Make Your Revit Families Move". Based upon the information shown in this class, I was able to create some awesome 2D entourage families with minimal input, in any pose that I required. 

As we all know, visualising data enables one to make more informed decisions - Verifying the ergonomics of a space, as an example. After all, whatever few seconds we can spare during work time, is less time we have to spend stuck in traffic.

Due to the speed and ease of changing the entourage family's pose, I even created my first Revit stop motion video, just for fun.

Have a great week, folks!

Hmmm... I haven't seen this before

"If you learn something new every day, you can teach something new every day." - Martha Stewart 

I came across two functions/properties in Revit recently which I have not noticed before. The first function is quite useful, especially if you tend to prefer right-click properties in Revit. I have checked the previous versions of Revit and it seems that this specific function was introduced in Revit 2017 (Likely the 2017.2 UR): 

In both the family creation environment, as well as the project environment, you are able to directly add a label to a dimension value through your right-click properties, as indicated by the images below. In the family creation environment, you will create a family parameter, whilst in the project environment, a global parameter will be created.

The second function is quite interesting and I have to admit, I scratched my head for a few seconds with this one! When drawing a circle in the Generic Annotation family environment, have a look at the properties panel: You might have noticed the Center Mark Visible option before, which is very useful for alignment and the like. 

However, who has noticed another property field called Filled? If checked, this property will automatically hatch the circle with a solid fill pattern. Try as you might to select this fill without knowing about the option is quite a task!

Have a great weekend, folks!

Origami Revit

"Scale allows us to understand the relationship between a representation - a drawing or model - and reality. Being able to draw accurately to scale, and to shift fluidly between scales, is one of the most important aspects of architectural drawing and spatial design." - Portico.Space

Creating Origami models in Revit was easier than I thought. If one remembers the golden rules of Revit family Creation, such as working from a reference image/sketch, creating a Framework, then Testing/Flexing the framework to see if it works, creating origami models in Revit will be a breeze. 

Recreating the swan in the picture above was done in the Conceptual Massing environment. Point elements were placed at corners and areas where folds were made in the origami model. These points were then connected with reference lines.

After the basic framework was created, depth and height was added by raising and dropping the point elements.

Due to reference lines connecting the point elements, it was possible to create surfaces to which materials were added.

Have a great weekend folks!