Friday 18 May 2012

Grasshopper to Vasari (via Revit for the time being)

I've started developing more aspects of conceptual mass family development primarily extruded form.  Others will follow ASAP like blends (http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2009/07/revit-form-creation-api.html is a good reference for forms that can be created from the API and some of the restrictions on the defining geometry).  I'd like to highlight and publicly thank Jeremy for the excellent resource his blog provides, it's been instrumental in me getting my addon up and running.

I also implemented an aggregation of buildings associated to a site as a conceptual family.  This then opens up an easier model transfer to Vasari.  Note I have started trying to implement a revit addon to generate conceptual IFC files directly, but some technical details (ie a crash I am yet to resolve) in initiating the import is preventing thus far.



So, here's the process for the time being.  Bake the IFC file from this Grasshopper definition (or download ifc file here).  Then import the IFC into Revit using the GeomGym addon.  This will create a revit conceptual family in the same folder as the model (or download here).  You can then import this into Vasari and run analysis such as the virtual wind tunnel.

Look forward to hearing suggestions and requests for improvements.

EDIT 21st September 2012  Note now there is a Vasari addon for Beta1 that directly imports IFC files.  Note the above example generates an individual mass family element for each building (there is not means to generate an inplace family object from Revit API).  Here's a Grasshopper file where there is a single site family and here's the resulting IFC file (but this isn't as fast to generate as I might expect so patience will help).

1 comment:

  1. Jon, can you get real time update of your geometry in Vasari?

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