Revit Single Point Repeater Patterns

Sample Revit Repeater Patterns

At RTC 2012 (Revit Technology Conference) last June, I presented a session on the new Revit v2013 "Divide" and "Repeat" tools.  The first part of the talk was about how the repeat pattern behaves in different situations - so I wanted to share some of the typical repeater patterns for reference - see below.  The conference paper goes into more detail, and then explains how you can use these patterns in Revit in real building situations.

Single Point Repeaters on a Divided Surface

Below is a chart of the basic patterns that can be achieved using a single point adaptive component hosted on a divided surface.  The results are not always what you expect.

Notice that patterns 10, 11 & 12 do not actually create a visible pattern, but the repeater element is there, and can be selected – this is because the patterns go off the edge of the surface and cannot find nodes to repeat on.

 Single Point Multiple Repeater Patterns:

Once you have 3 or more of the original hosted components (eg. 4 square as below), Revit will no longer create one single repeater pattern, but will create a number of patterns that alternate with each other.  This will happen regardless of whether the originals are the same or different.  In the example below it actually creates 4 separate repeater patterns (see one of them highlighted in orange).  You can take advantage of this to create a repeater pattern on alternate nodes by deleting the repeaters that you don’t want – see end result to the right immediately below.

You can create less regular looking patterns by making the originals all different, or else you can create patterns that look right but are only achievable by “working the system” – eg. A tartan pattern by only changing the look of one of four hosted original components: 

Alternatively you may need to create multiple repeaters and then delete some of them to achieve the desired results, as shown in example 13.  If you generate a repeater that creates a pattern on nodes that are already occupied, Revit seems quite happy to do this.

More to follow on multiple point repeaters in another post . . . . . Multiple Point Repeaters on Divided Surfaces       Two-Point Repeaters on Multiple Hosts

Revit Repeaters Index Page