Circular repeater geometry in Revit

In previous posts I have described how easy it is in Revit to use a circle as a rig to host regular geometric shapes like squares and hexagons.  It occurred to me the other day that circles would also be ideal hosts for parametric stars;  put that together with Repeaters and you get some interesting possibilities . . .

Here is how to create a parametric star:

• Create a new adaptive component;  
• Place a point at the origin; make its reference planes visible
• Set the horizontal ref plane as the work plane
• Place a reference line circle onto the point
• Make its radius dimension into a parameter

• Select the circle
• Divide Path

•  It will create a divided path on top of the circle with 6 nodes

• Create another Adaptive component
• Place two points, and make them adaptive
• Place a line between the points, remembering to enable "3D Snapping" first

• Save the second family (eg. as "AC 2pt Line")
• Load it into the first family
• Place one of the components onto two non-adjacent nodes

 

• Select the two-point component and click on the Repeat command

• You should end up with a triangle
• NB.  if you placed the two-point adaptive line component onto adjacent nodes you'd get a hexagon

• Actually, a triangle is only half of what we want, but we need to backtrack to get the correct result - so, UNDO the repeat command
• Place a second two-point adaptive on alternating non-adjacent nodes

•  Select both lines and click on Repeat

•   
•  You should end up with a six pointed star, which is now a "Repeater"

• Select the divided path, and change the number of nodes to 5, giving you a five pointed star

•  Change it to 4, which gives a cross (not so useful)

•  Change it to 3 for a triangle

•  Change it back up to 7

•  And then to 8 - this gives an eight pointed star that could be useful in tiling patterns when repeated itself on a divided surface

•  As the number of nodes increase, the shape becomes closer to a circle

• Now all you need to do is turn the number of nodes into a parameter to get yourself a one-point adaptive parametric star component
• Oh, one more thing - you need to make the nodes of the divided path not visible otherwise they will show up when this component is placed in a project or another family

How useful is this going to be?  We'll investigate that in a future post . . .
Here is one possible use - geometric patterns