TOPIC: Adaptive Components

A few years back, a client had asked if there was a way to build a Geodesic Dome in Revit. I tried, and tried… but got nowhere in the limited time I had. The only solution I could recommend was to use a script to generate points that could then be connected by adaptive components.

Then yesterday, when looking for something else (as is wont to happen more often than I care to admit), I found a tutorial by Tom Vollaro that broke down the problem in terms of simple geometry. I not only learnt how to build a geodesic sphere, but finally understood the underlying geometric basis for the form.

Of course, not all of us have the time to build it ourselves – So, I’m sharing :-). (You can download it from my drive here)

Curved panels are particularly gnarly! Curved and Non-rectilinear are more so. This is one of those situations where you don’t have a choice but to use Adaptive Components.

In this post, I’m going to attempt to show how simple the building of a curved and trapezoidal panel can be. So, bring out the rusty trigonometry toolbox (or googling skills) and let’s get started!
(more…)

The next part of this two-part series focuses on the actual placement of the adaptive component (This is the link to Part One). This part might tend to get boring since it entails the endless picking of Grid Intersections for all the bays of the building. Fortunately, this does not have to be the case: anytime you see a repetitive task, think of the purpose for inventing machines – the computer in this case. The only variables in this case are the eight Adaptive Points and they can be abstracted away in terms of their x & y coordinates ( the z coordinate is not being considered since it is being controlled by the internal instance parameters of the Adaptive Component). Once this information is read by a python code, it is just a matter of telling the python code to place the Adaptive Points at those coordinates.
(more…)