Sunday, September 29, 2013

Facades+ This Month!!!



The Facades+ PERFORMANCE conference is just around the corner.  Join me and other great speakers and instructors in Chicago on October 24-25 for some fantastic presentations, discussions and workshops!


I will be moderating the Innovation panel discussion on October 24. We will discuss how new information-based technologies are informing the contemporary discourse on building and facade performance.

The Innovation Panelists will be...
  • Franklin Lancaster (Eckersley O’Callaghan) 
  • Matt Herman (Buro Happold) 
  • Jonatan Schumacher (Thornton Tomasetti)
On October 25th, I going to be giving a Facades+ Tech Workshop:

Parametric BIM: Facade Design Using Dynamo for Autodesk Revit

Dynamo is an open source graphical programming language for Autodesk Revit and Vasari. Dynamo can be used to customize a wide variety of computational design processes within Revit’s Building Information Modeling environment. This workshop will explore how Dynamo can be used as a took for studying parametric facades. Participants will learn how to use Dynamo for generating facade geometry, deploying Revit families, utilizing analysis information, and managing complex parameters.



Sunday, September 15, 2013

Porting Panels for Dynamo

Dynamo has introduced a pretty cool way to share custom nodes and graphs.  To give this a try, I ported a few scripts from my Lunchbox plug-in to Dynamo custom nodes.  Users can search and install these scripts by looking for the XYZ Cells by Face package...

Contents
  • XYZ Quad Grid  by Face
  • XYZ Triangle Grid by Face
  • XYZ Diamond Grid by Face
  • XYZ Staggered Grid by Face

Custom user nodes can be installed through Dynamo's package manager.
The new Dynamo package manager... nice concept for distributing custom nodes!

The XYZ Cell nodes utilize some custom Python scripts.  Feel free to re-use and modify :)
A few different patterns made up of Adaptive Component panels

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Crossing the Streams... with more Interop!


So you may have noticed that many of the interoperability studies have been one-way connections from Grasshopper into Revit.  More often than not, we have found that teams are generally following a linear path for design to production with the Revit model and drawings being the final deliverable.  Technically, however, the solutions we have been developing are quite non-linear in nature... data is free to move in any direction through senders and receivers.

Here is an example of moving data from Revit into Grasshopper.  There may be any number of reasons you might want to do this... For example, creating references to key project datums, developing systems in relation to Revit geometry, or even simple data visualization.


The interop process creates a live link between Revit elements and the Grasshopper model.
Once the data is in Grasshopper, it can be used for reference or as the basis of a definition.