Thursday, December 31, 2015

Dynamo Simple, Practical Examples: Draw a Revit Wall

Learning Dynamo is hard. Is it worth it? Yes, it offers great potential in a number of areas. Here are a few things that Dynamo can help you with:

  • Importing and Exporting Excel data very easily. Beside being able to use this data in Excel, this provides a bridge to other software like Inventor, Solidworks and more. For example you could export points from a curtain wall in Revit to Inventor or vice versa. 
  • Automating the placement of Families. Good example is auditorium and stadium seating. 
  • You can connect parameters from one Family to another. For example connect the floor thickness to the wall top offset.

Because it's hard to learn I would like to provide a few simple (practical?) Dynamo examples. Here's my first...a Dynamo Graph which shows you a way to draw a wall in Revit using Dynamo.






3 comments:

ahaney said...

Drawing a wall is easy enough. How can I draw multiple walls and set the location line, and the direction of interior vs exterior (ie which side of the wall is interior and which side is exterior)?

Blue Jay said...

You can set the location line using the 'setparameterByName' node but I can't seem to get it to affect the positioning. The walls always want to draw from the centerline. I used the Curve.Offset to get a similar result when paired with the 'getparameterByName' thickness parameter divided by 2. Drawing multiple walls can be done with making multiple 'curves'. Still not what I would call easy. Autodesk needs to keep working at making Dynamo truly practical and user friendly. Thanks for your comment.

ahaney said...

I agree, dynamo is a great tool but still has a long way to go. It's frustrating that it still doesn't allow you to flip a wall about it's location line to flip interior and exterior sides of the wall. I'm looking forward to dynamo developing further.