Project 2 - United Tower - Building Information Modeling - Arch 653 Texas A&M University

Project 2 (Fall 2017)
Building Information Modeling - Course 653 - Texas A&M University

The purpose of this project is to utilize Dynamo as a visual programming plugin to boost the strength of parametric modeling in project one. So obviously the final product of the first project has been chosen as an input for the second project.

Figure 1

I divided the second project into three stages and will explain each with screenshots of the Revit and Dynamo interface.

At first, in Dynamo interface, I Defined the parametric features regarding height and angle in the project 1. As you can see in figure 2.

Figure 2

The imported nodes accept a string, so I changed the parameter groups in project 1 to text. It’s just the first solution came to my mind. There are better solutions for sure. Figure 3 is showing that.

Figure 3

Once I am done with overall Angle and Height parameter, I added parametric features relating to widths of 5 section plans that I created earlier for the first project.

Figure 4

Figure 5 and 6 are showing what we get after applying these changes in Dynamo.

Figure 5

Figure 6

At the second phase, I wanted to map and read different colors in a picture on the curtain panels of the facade. To do so at first, I should tell the Dynamo to select a curtain panel. Then I may get the category of element by related node and have all the elements of that category available for next phase.

Figure 7

After I imported the image path to the dynamo, I made the image input to be 50 x 36 pixels, as the facade of the project include 1800 panels. So each pixel will map to each panel of the facade. Finally, using Flatten node, I fitted the format of override color view.

Figure 8

Figure 9 is showing the final result after applying this dynamo file to the project

Figure 9

At the final stage of project 2, I decided to run sun path analysis using Dynamo. I used the same process that was shown in our BIM class couple of times. I will do the color coding of my façade panel based on the direction of each panel against the sun. Then at first, I should get normals of all my curtain panel surfaces.

Figure 10

To do so, I get the faces of all curtain panels with get element face node. After I got the faces of each element, 2 points for each surface normal, and vector for direction of each. I see the normals are being shown in the model. The next step is importing the current setting of the sun and getting the vector representing its direction.

After that, I calculated the dot product of 2 vectors, Sun and curtain panel normals. Next, I mapped the dot product between 0 to 1, and entered them as a value in a color range node. The color input of this node has also been defined.