If you’re living in United Kingdom and you’re interested in Dynamo, computational design and automation, I strongly recommend getting involved with UK Dynamo User group. So far I’ve attended two meetings and it was a time well spent! Each meeting consists of 3-4 longer presentations and quick round of tips & tricks from other users. When the official part is over, there’s time for casual networking and it usually involves a pub nearby. In terms of topics covered on those meetings, some of my favorite lectures were about macros, add-ins, modelling from point cloud, computational design in structural engineering and linking Revit with Power BI.

Here’s a picture from May meeting, you can even spot me there:You can find them here, there’s an event happening in Manchester, 7th September.

Watch out when the tickets are out – because they might be gone within an hour!

Hello again! As it turns out, moving all your livelihood to a different country is quite an absorbing process and I had to skip on my blogging for a bit. But now I’m back and…

 

…picture a massive hospital model in Revit that’s in dire need of painting. The default tool for applying paint is not the most efficient one to say the least and the deadline is approaching. What do you do? Since taking a holiday break was not an option, my second guess was to use Dynamo for that.

This script can be broken into two parts.

First part deals with sorting the walls per width and base constraint. To my surprise, the former wasn’t as straight forward I thought (It might have something to do with family structure for “Walls” category). In order to get the value of width, I used the following combination of two Python scripts:

import clr
clr.AddReference('RevitAPI')
from Autodesk.Revit.DB import *
items = UnwrapElement(IN[0])
typelist = list()
for item in items:
      try:
        typelist.append(item.Document.GetElement(item.GetTypeId()))
      except:
        typelist.append(list())
OUT = typelist

and:

check = IN[0]
items = IN[1]
     if isinstance(check, (list)): OUT = items
else: OUT = items[0]

Combining those two with some basic BoolMasks leaves me with a list of walls-to-be-painted. Now to the second part – applying paint.

I must admit, my Revit API game isn’t the strongest, so to get this (simple, I know) script working I had to consult it with a colleague of mine. The final product is as follows:

import clr
clr.AddReference('RevitAPI')
from Autodesk.Revit.DB import *
clr.AddReference("RevitNodes")
import Revit
clr.ImportExtensions(Revit.GeometryConversion)
clr.AddReference("RevitServices")
import RevitServices
from RevitServices.Persistence import DocumentManager
from RevitServices.Transactions import TransactionManager
doc =  DocumentManager.Instance.CurrentDBDocument

elems = UnwrapElement(IN[0])
paintmat = UnwrapElement(IN[1])

TransactionManager.Instance.EnsureInTransaction(doc)
for elem in elems:
     for geo in elem.get_Geometry(Options()):
             for face in geo.Faces:
                      doc.Paint(elem.Id, face, paintmat.Id)
TransactionManager.Instance.TransactionTaskDone()
OUT = elems

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the Python part of this Dynamo script seems to be “remembering” the values, i.e. when I’m done with painting one selections of walls and I want change the values by which I sort them – this script insists on painting the original selection. I think I’m missing something obvious here, feel free to enlighten me.

 

…but let me start with explaining WHY I’m doing this. Imagine a high rise located somewhere in London, It will have 60-something floors, around 18000 beams, more than 2000 columns – and 2-5 people working on the structural model, just to make the tight deadlines possible. It would be hard to keep track. Now imagine a lot of design changes, structural supports moving left and right, columns disappearing and appearing again. And to top it all – very restrictive column schedule macro that doesn’t take “almost in line” as an answer. I need to be able to quickly see if all the columns are in line, are the column numbers assigned correctly and were there any last-minute design changes that I’m not aware of.

Now we get to the Dynamo part. This is what I have so far, and keep in mind this is just a very early version of this concept:

So what’s the deal here? First, we get all the columns from the model and choose the column “path” that we’re interested in (C12 here). Then it get’s trickier – as far as I know, Dynamo 1.1 (which I’ve used to write this) doesn’t have an easy way to get X,Y location of the center of the column (I know there’s a node for that in 1.2), so I’ve came up with following workaround: we get the coordinates value from Element.Solid – asking for maximum and minimum Y (thus getting the point in the middle), and we subtract this with value of the column below. If it’s zero – columns are in line. To make this work, columns should be sorted according to Z value, and to my suprise this wasn’t the default – somehow slopped columns mess up this order (that’s why the counter-intuitive sorting method)

As I said, this is still very early version, and here are my plans for further development:

• Exporting to Excel
• Export all the columns, not just one “line”
• Checking X,Y values at the top and bottom, so that slopped columns won’t be seen as an “value other than zero”

Feel free to comment on this script – I’m still learning here!