Ammo: Volume between toposurfaces

Much has been said about the topo tools in Revit, and I for one vote for Civil 3D any day. But once in a while (or rather often) we want to keep things internally in Revit.

An operation that I've always wanted to do in Revit is to calculate the volume between two seperate toposurfaces in Revit. Yes, you can use graded region and phases, and yes, it is cumbersome at best.. What often is the case is that the existing terrain is measured and modeled up early in the project and then the data for the excavated site are delivered later in the project phases. Equally often the data has different outreach in plan and therefore it is sometimes difficult to make any sense of the cut/fill values in Revit.

A similar challenge arises with differences in topos when you have sheet piling.

What I found myself looking for is a method for how to find the volume between two seperate surfaces within a polygon that I've drawn myself.

So here is a simple definition that will do exactly that:

The number input must be large enough to cover both top and bottom topo from where the model lines are drawn.

And the results, with the imported geometry in revit:

Hope it can can be used for something good. Definition here

The next step would be to use different model curves for top/bottom topos for sloped volumes, but that is a whole other story..

Dislaimer: The Topography.Surface node can struggle when used on large topos. modifications soon to come based on Dimitar Venkovs excellent response adn research in this thread

Dynamo and XML: the Sidetracked Reviteer

I read Nathan Millers blog post today about the new release of Lunchbox including XML parsing and exporting and naturally I wanted to try it out.

What ended up being not so natural was the data I used to test the nodes on.. As the title says I got sidetracked.

I googled "xml open data api"  showing only norwegian results and after a couple of minutes looking through the results I was looking at a XML of all the representatives of the norwegian parliament.

And after some fiddling around: Voila! All the representatives sorted by age in excel. The real question is what can't Dynamo do?

Hopefully I'll be utilizing these nodes for something better in the future. (And also not setting up lists of norwegian representatives on a friday night.. Jeez..) But one of my goals for this blog is to show people that you can do virtually anything with Dynamo, and I guess this falls into that category.

Now, off to more sensible stuff.

3D Grids in Revit using Dynamo

Go have a search for "Viewing grid lines in 3d view" over at Autodesk knowledge network and you'll get, and I quote the solution: "Currently, you cannot display grid lines in a 3D view."

Well spank my ass and call me Sally..

But until we can do this in native Revit, lets give Dynamo a go shall we?

One could probably expand this definition by optimizing text placement, setting letter sizes according to view scales, adding grid bubbles and whatnot. The only thing I've added is the possibility to choose which level the model curve grids are placed at. For me that's enough.

A little screencast with no lyrics or chatter for your viewing pleasure.


EDIT: Here's a version were you can choose whether the definition will make grids at all levels or just one.

the definition