- For 2 or More Units: Creating Forms with Revit Conceptual Masses
- Images/screenshots showing two variations of the input parameters for:
- your flexing and testing one of the provided example building forms
- your flexing and testing your new, original building form
- For 3 or More Units: Creating Forms with Dynamo or Grasshopper Geometry
- Images/screenshots showing two variations of the input parameters for your new building form created with Dynamo or grasshopper
- Your answers to the Points to Ponder questions for each stage of the assignment that you completed.
- Point to Ponder 1: It’s useful to be able to transfer data from Dynamo to Excel in order to run cost calculations or visualize the data using graphs and charts.
- Point to Ponder 2: The rotation parameter had the biggest effect on creating a desirable building form. It added more interesting detail to the building’s shape than the size of the middle ellipse of the three profiles in the tower. The size of the profiles are pretty easily scalable while the amount of rotation creates a more significant difference in the aesthetic.
Here is flexing of the provided Twisting Rectangular Mass. The parameters that could be affected with a slider are the width and depth of the rectangle form as well as twisting in degrees of the top rectangle. The base measurements provide the requested square footage within the rectangular plot’s constraints, and the flex parameters explore more possibilities to achieve the requirements with slightly different shapes.
The flex parameters were height and rotation degree. Being a long and skinny plot, the building must be such as well to get the desired floor area.
For my own conceptual mass, I created a sort of heart-shaped profile that ended up looking more like a chevron. Then I used the three-profile tower template from the shared drive and augmented it to make a tower with my own profile.
The flex parameters here were the top rotation and the tower height. Excel charts of outcomes for gross surface area and gross floor area depending on different heights, different rotations, and different depths are in the Autodesk link above.
This building was made in Dynamo, with three profiles of ellipses with various X-radii, Y-radii, rotations, and vertical translations. It is incredibly flexible with number sliders controlling all radii and rotations, making a ton of shapes possible as seen above.
Using intersections of rectangular surfaces with the ellipse building as suggested in the workflow, I was able to calculate gross floor area. Additionally calculated from Geometry Surface and Solid nodes were gross volume and gross surface area.
I created a custom node called TowerEllipsebyMiddleXandRotation that could create the building for certain X-radius, Y-radius, and rotation parameters. This was then used to simultaneously evaluate two sets of values as input. To assist with exploring metrics resulting from different test cases, I looped all different combinations of these sets of values: 1) middle ellipse X-radius length and 2) middle ellipse rotation; see below.
