Louvre Configurator Tool
Intended users
Architects and designers working in Revit who want to quickly and easily explore passive shading techniques or apply louvers as decoration. It will be especially useful during early design phases when designers are still testing options and don’t want to commit to building out detailed Revit families.
Need you’re trying to provide a solution or support for
This idea came from my current architecture studio, where we needed a louver system for our very large, very glassy building and ended up spending hours developing a custom Revit family to get them to rotate properly and then placing the segments individually across the facade. Although it worked, it was very tedious and time consuming, and didn’t leave much time for us to iterate on the design of the louvers due to how long they took to model. When we went to a desk critique and our professor proposed we change the louver type from vertical to horizontal, my team had to disregard his suggestion and commit to the vertical orientation due to time constraints. If we had this tool, we would have been able to quickly and easily implement that change.
Inputs
The user can pick a face, indicate whether they want vertical or horizontal louvers, set a depth, spacing, and rotation angle, and then the tool will generate them automatically.
Underlying logic of the model you’ll implement
It arrays lines across the selected face, rotates them to the desired angle, and then extrudes them to the specified depth, forming the louvers. All of the geometry will be generated within Dynamo. Built-in rules will keep the geometry clean / avoid errors (I’ll build in safeguards by limiting the spacing width and I’ll make sure it can’t create impossible geometry by bounding the array to the surface).
Outputs
A parametric louver system that updates in real time and can be implemented in the Revit model. I will also include an output summary with the number of louvers and the total surface area they cover to make the output easier for designers to understand.