Revit Octopus - RTC 2012 NA Competition Winner

Octopus Hotel, Hainan

Back in 2012 this drawing was the Innovation category competition winner at RTC North America (Atlanta).  It was meant to represent the design process (on yellow trace paper and in Revit) of the Octopus Hotel designed by PTW in their Shanghai office.  The initial design modelling was done in Sketchup and 3D Max, then 2D documented in Autocad.  Then we had to start really documenting it in Revit to make sure the organic shapes were buildable. . . . .

The first task to solve was the plan layout - making sure that each hotel wing (octopus leg) had regular radius curves with smooth transitions between concave and convex curves, with a minimum number of different shaped hotel rooms.  Trying to do that in 2D was painful - lots of reference planes/lines and aligning centre-points of arcs with each other, and plenty of calculations.  If anyone made a change to the layout you had to start all over again.

To improve this process in Revit, I decided to make a flexible component that would place a number of tapered hotel rooms along an arc.  Initially I tried a line-based generic component that required the user to click a start and end point - that worked fine for linear hotel rooms.

As soon as I tried radial arrays, it became a nightmare, as they are really hard to control with parameters.  As adaptive components had recently been introduced to Revit, that seemed to be the way to go - but then I realised that they do not allow the Array command.  'Repeaters' to the rescue!

All of this required a lot of complex fomulas and trigonometry, even with using Repeaters - particularly as I wanted the end user to be able to dynamically change and schedule room areas, widths and the radius.

 

 

Area calculations for segments

Eventually I managed to create an adaptive component that had two curves (concave and convex), forming a corridor double loaded with rooms.  This was fully parametric in terms of being able to stretch the start and end points and change the two radii as well as critical room dimensions.

 

This would have made the design process so much easier than relying on several different programs and yellow trace paper!  Creation of this component was fully documented in my handout for the RTC events in 2012 (Australasia and North America).  When I get a chance I will try to post some of the techniques on this blog.

The 2d planning was only the start of the challenges - each hotel room had a balcony that had curves in plan and in elevation, so that really challenged Revit's ability to create organic geometry - but we did succeed in building a convincing 3D model in Revit.

Octopus hotel wing

 

Of course, now you might be tempted to use Dynamo to build this sort of complex geometry.

RTC 2013 NA Competition Entry - More Revit Repeaters

Revit Museum of Innovation

Here is another image that was part of my drawing competition entry at RTC 2013 in Vancouver.  This is the outdoor view of the Revit Museum of Innovation - to go with the indoor image shown in this earlier blog post.  The image was created using 100% Revit - that means no Photoshop, no API, no Dynamo, no background jpegs.  The purpose of the image was to show what can be done using Repeaters in Revit - most of the techniques were described previously, with the exception of the conical sculpture and the background sky:

Conical Sculpture

There is a (hidden) half conical mass that has its surface divided. 

 The U grid is rotated by 30 degrees, which gives a spiral effect

 
On one of the nodes of the divided surface was placed one adaptive star component that changed its shape depending on how far it was from a specific reference point - that point being a second adaptive point snapped to an adjacent node on the spiral of the divided surface.

 When the adaptive star component is repeated, it replicates itself along the spiral path;  as it goes up the cone, the nodes become closer together and the star gradually changes shape until it becomes a hexagon, and then almost a circle.  This technique of using two circles with variable diameters to drive hosted geometry was described a couple of years ago - Revit Repeaters and Flexing Star Adaptive Components

Of course the cone itself had parameters to control its height and proportions, which in turn changed the patterns applied to its surface.

Background Sky

Notice the colour/lighting gradient in the background - it changes horizontally.
Originally I was trying to use the View Background settings to create a gradient between sky and horizon

The sky effect looked ok on screen, and when I did a screen capture:

The screen resolution and captured image were not good enough to project on a screen at RTC or to print out at A3.
But as soon as I tried to print it or export a jpeg image, it created a banded effect - this was in Revit 2013 at the time.   This bug was subsequently fixed in v2014.

At the time I had to make do with the buggy version 2013, so I resorted to an old technique for creating sky gradients:
I created a giant blue cylinder around the model, so that the viewpoint could see the inside of the cylinder as a background - as seen in the final artwork shown at the top.

For more about Revit Repeaters, refer to the Repeaters Index page

Revit Computational Design - RTC 2014 Competition Entry

Pump up the Volume - Computational design with slider controls

Above is an image of my competition entry for the innovation category of the drawing competition at RTC 2014.
It may not be such a flashy image, but the intent was to show innovation in the use of Revit as a design tool using 100% pure Revit without any Dynamo or API add-ins.

What is in the image?

• On the right is a mass model representing a twisting building with a sloping top;  the green rectangle represents an angled "solar access cutting plane" that prevents the building going any higher than defined but adjustable height controls.
• On the left is a series of slider controls that can be used to change the dimensions of the mass model, along with its degree of twist; 
• There are also slider and rotating controls for the solar access cutting plane, which set the base cutting height, sun angle and azimuth so that overshadowing can be evaluated at different times of day and year just by rotating the dials in Revit.
• There is also a mass floor area schedule and tags that automatically update, as well as calculate the Floor Space Ratio (FSR) of the building mass.

How was this done?

• The slider controls are line based components, placed into a model;  they have shape handles that can be dragged
• The Mass family is an in-place mass that is built onto a series of adaptive component rigs
• The Adaptive Component rigs have several free adaptive points that are snapped onto the sliders;  the distance between the adaptive points is measured using reporting parameters
• Changes in reporting parameter distances drive changes in the adaptive rigs, which in turn change the mass family that is hosted onto the rigs.

All of this is clearly described in the handout notes that accompanied my presentations "Pump up the Volume" at RTC 2014 in Australia (Melbourne) and North America (Chicago).  Hopefully I will get time to publish the technique in more detail on this blog in the future.  Alternatively you can download the presentation from the RTC website if you attended either conference;  or wait until they become available on AUGI later this year.


Refer to this post for a link to a youtube video

Revit Repeaters - RTC 2013 Competition Entry

Revit Repeater artwork

This image was part of my  entry for the drawing competition at RTC 2013, in the innovation category.  It was created using 100% Revit, without the use of Dynamo or any add-in APIs.  It was done to demonstrate some of the capabilities of the new "Repeater" command that was added to Revit 2013.

The museum building wall was created as a mass family, consisting of a curved spline in plan, extruded upwards to represent the outside facade;  its surface was divided into a rectangular grid.  A five point adaptive component panel was placed on one rectangle of the grid, with one of its points snapped to a common control point off the surface of the wall;  the panel was then repeated across the entire facade;  the size of the window in each panel was controlled by its distance from the control point - using the "reactor principle" described on Zach Kron's Buildz blog (a complex formula defined a sine-wave pattern for the change in window size).  Hopefully I will get time to document the technique on this blog eventually!

The artwork on the wall was done using two-way repeater pyramids that change shape depending where they are in the pattern - refer to how-to-schedule-panel-locations.

The people were single-point adaptive components consisting of lofted circles that had parametric diameters at various heights up the body, used to create different body shapes for each family type. The people outside were turned into repeaters by hosting six of them on divided splines, then using the repeat command - thus forming queues of people snaking into the museum entrance.

The signage on the roof of the museum was done with adaptive component (model text) repeaters that automatically rotate to face the camera - refer to my Mona-lisas-eyes-follow-revit-camera blog post.

The ground surface texture was done by creating a divided surface with slightly distorted adaptive components placed in a pattern of four and then repeated.

For more on this competition entry see the outdoor image of the museum