Ammo: Sheet piles with Revit and Dynamo

I'm gonna show you a quite useful workflow in this post that utilize Revit and Dynamo to produce a sheet pile wall extended to a toposurface with a variable top level.

There are of course many ways to approach this, the workflow I'll show you is this:

1. Top of sheet piling is drawn by model lines in the project.(Clockwise or Anticlockwise)
2. A topography for reference top terrain
3. A topography that will drive the bottom of the sheet pile.
3. Select the model lines and lowest surface.
4. Dynamo magic! (and replication guides... lots and lots of them..)

The family I'm using here is a hosted adaptive component.

The hosted component: 2pt adaptive component
1. Create two AC-points underneath eachother in a new family.
2. Draw a sheet pile profile on the first point's horizontal plane.
3. Select the two points and create a spline.
4. Change the spline and change it to a reference line in the properties.
5. Select the reference line and the closed profile and hit create form.
6. Check that the point number two change the depth of the form.
7. Load in to the next family.

The rig: 3pt adaptive component
1. Create two adaptive points on the same level in a new family
2. Select the two points and create a spline between them, later changing it to a reference line.
3. Make the first point's vertical plane the active workplane and place a point on the first adaptive point.
4. Drag the point downwards a bit and make it adaptive. (So it becomes the third adaptive point.)
5. Set workplane to the reference line's horizontal plane.
6. Click Create>Component and place the component's first point so that it snaps to the workplane of the referenceplane. (you may have to tab a little bit..)
7. the second point of the component you snap to the Rig's third point. (are you still following??)
8. Observe that by changing the Rig's second point's position, you rotate the hosted component.
9. select "Always Vertical" in the properties.
10. If you want to report the height of the family you can create a reporting parameter between the first and third point.
11. Load into project

The Script: Replication guides heaven
I chose to show a condensed version of this script this time, and the reason are the powerful replication guides. I feel like I'm starting to get hold of these buggers and maybe I will create a blogpost about them in near future. Shortly put, if you ever need to use List.Combine or multiple List.Map nodes, you're easier of, in terms of screen estate, using replication guides.

Often, Sheet piles will close of a building site and to keep things simple I suggest that you draw all your model lines either clockwise or anti-clockwise. this way you will not have to worry about which way the sheet piles are turned. (I'm sure, however, that this is doable given some time and some imperative code). I'v included a simple -1 or 1 for direction in the script depending on whether you drawn them clockwise/anti-clockwise

Count on your PC having to work a bit with this. in the example provided, it took about 7 minutes to create all 1230 generic models.

A particular useful thing about this script is that you can split the model lines where you observe that it is to low compared to the terrain and then change the workplane so that the lines are optimal. I guess a further study would include projecting the lines to the top terrain as well with an offset.

A little youtube video showing a more uncondensed version: Youtube