Side Bar: “Can Revit Do it” Post

This has been floating around for a while, so I figured I’d give it a shot….

AUGI- "Can Revit do It"

The key to this one is that Revit Won’t make a Surface from closed loops when doing any sort of loft. So I tried a few things an came up with a technique that will give me one continuous surface that has a continuous UV grid.  I was able to accomplish it, but I wouldn't say it was easy and Revit seems to break down without the ability to use lines as rails.  I would say this is about 10 times easier in most tools, but its good to keep the mind nimble.

Greg

You can see if you simply use a loft the surfaces get divided into quadrants.

 

Sidebar: Diva for Rhino: Radiance

For those of you that are interested in using Radiance for daylighting analysis make sure you check out diva for Rhino.  It takes a lot of the work out of managing and creating radiance inputs.  I’ll be putting together some videos as part of my project in the near future showing a Revit workflow, but for the time being check out their website and videos.

http://www.diva-for-rhino.com/index.html

Google Earth to Civil 3d….Actual Demo

Here is my long delayed first video for my little project.  It simply shows the workflow between Google Earth and Civil 3D …

Thanks,

Sidebar: Points- U and V Values of a Surface in Revit

A quick note about “Sidebars”…I’m going to be using them just to point out stuff that doesn’t fit into my overall project demonstration, but is still interesting to consider.

One of the nice things about the conceptual environments in Revit 2010 and 2011 are the point tools.  One that I really don’t use often is the Surface Hosted Point….not to confused by the Host by intersect method.  I would use it more, but its really hampered by the fact that there is no way to re-parameterize a surface so you could apply the U and V values against a consistent range of Max and Min values.

 

With that said, it could be useful if you need to find the plane normal to a surface.  Also if the surface is not going to change and you can workout the range for the U and V values you might be able position the point accurately. 

I attached a short video showing some of its features. It does work with Imported surfaces.  I have used it mostly with AutoCAD 2011 surfaces, but I’m sure Rhino and others will work as well.

Points Hosted on Surface

Notice how the “Hosted U Parameter” in the Video didn’t accept a predicted value.

More to come…

Getting Started: The Site: #001

Over the next few posts, I’ll look at how to best capture site information for use in some very basic site analysis.  The key application for this will be Google Earth, as it seems to be the best tool at my disposal to begin capturing this information.

http://earth.google.com/intl/en/index.html

Note: If you are using Google Earth in a Professional Context, there are some sticky items in the EULA to watch out for.

http://earth.google.com/intl/en-US/license.html

Why Chicago?

I lived in Chicago, but now live in New York City.  I love both cities, but I couldn’t think of a good place to put the project I had in mind.   That with my natural tendency towards water, and a somewhat irreverent notion of a second Burnham Pier(2.0) in mind , I landed here.

Pier 2.0 – An Architectural Design Blog that happens to be about software

My goal is pretty simple; illustrate how a wide variety of software tools can aide the design and delivery process.

During the course of the project I'm going to try to cover a large range of topics and processes so to better understand and illustrate workflows.  With that in mind I going to try not to duplicate work, but instead find ways to reuse information.

Just to get started…..

The Site