mandag 2. mai 2016

Ammo: Point Analysis with Revit and Dynamo

First of all, congratulations to the Dynamo team on the 1.0.0 release. Long awaited, but the work is still in progress according to Zach Kron: http://dynamobim.org/dynamo-1-0-0-release/

The Dev team has also made some changes to the node names. Old definition with the old nodes will be "translated" into the new ones automatically, but it won't update inside code blocks so please be aware of the following changes: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/Dynamo-Node-Changes

Secondly, check out the Prorubim packages right now. I mean right now.. The creator of this collection of packages is Aleksey Lobanov, which some of you already know have created the neat little Dyno addin. In the Prorubim DS Common Kit you'll find the small, but not insignificant GetVar and SetVar nodes which will take any of the standard Dynamo inputs and store it as a kind of a global variable for you to use elsewhere on the canvas. Nice!
Sadly it doesn't work with lists or code block inputs as of yet, but I really think the Dynamo Dev team should implement some of the same logic into "Portal"-nodes. That would be really helpful in this odd spaghetti world we operate in..



Now to the main point of this post. I have to admit one thing..
The analysis nodes in Dynamo located right under the Revit tab has passed right by me up until now. Seen them, thought they were for solar studies, not understood them one bit, moved on.


Thankfully, a cunning fellow over at Autodesk, Dieter Vermeulen, has shown the way in this here blogpost.

It can be used for anything really! If you have data and it is somewhat connected to points, UV's on a surface or maybe even a vector field you can use Dynamo to create a visualisation of that data inside of Revit.
To keep things fairly short I'll focus on the PointAnalysis in this post, the others (Vector and Face) works in a near identical manner so I'll guess you can figure it out.

Proof of concept: Height map on topography
Just a simple little test for showing the capabilities. Takes a topo, creates a point grid and project it on the surface. Measures the distance to topo and send the data to Revit.

A little proof of concept script
(Ps, the Unit Type node seems to be flawed in 1.0.0, have reported it..)
Once you've run the definition once the PointAnalysis node has sent the data to a view in Revit, but you will have to conjure the data up by doing a little view settings exercise.

1. Select the Default Analysis Display Style
2. Hit the new Display style icon
3. Choose your analysis style
Now figure out your settings with colors, sizes etc. and you're all set.

Few other examples of use:

Stadion C-values:

Where the best place is to be at the AU 2016 opening keynote according to my last post and visualised in Revit:


As I said, endless possibilities! :)