Revit Facade Family

[Jacquelyne Betance]

HelloI am new to the interoperability workflows, and was wondering if I could push a custom facade element that I created in Grasshopper, to Revit as a family (and possibly other tools). I need to communicate geometry as well as some information about the element. Aside from Rhino.Inside, is there a way I could achieve this? How would I go about it if I wanted to create an IFC model of the element, preferably with the help of opensource libraries (eg. xbim)?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Hi, I am fairly new to Revit but I do have a fairly good grasp on how to use and navigate the program. What I am trying to do is create a facade for the side of my building that is made up of parametric windows. I have created parametric constraints that surround an opening to what could be a window. These are made up of various extrusions that protrude from a basic window family. Currently, I have an opening of where a window should be and I would like to be able to insert a variable awning window that could also be constrained with parameters. The problem that I am having is that Revit does not recognize the solid protrusion from the wall as part of the wall thus I cannot insert a "window" into the opening that I have. I am wondering if I am going about this the right way or if there is an easier way to achieve the same result. Ultimately I want to be able to manipulate the "parametric window" that surrounds the opening, which I can already do, as well as manipulate the awning window within the opening of my window/wall facade. Is this something that is possible to do with parameters or is there a better way of going about this in general.

p/s: if you want to re-use a wall based awning window then it can be done as well. But you need to "release" it from the wall in the awning family and set an offset distant in order to control its location manually in the parent family.

if I'm reading you right, the host wall (in the real world) is framed with a recess in it -- like you're showing in your second image. Correct? How about modeling it that way? It's more accurate. Then your window will host fine.

How would I go about making a stand alone family? Do you mean that the awning window family is not constrained within a wall because if that is the case, I feel like that is what you are implying in your second option by releasing the window from the wall. If you could explain how to release a window from a wall and set the offset distance so that it aligns with my protrusion, that would be great! Otherwise, your first suggestion leads me to believe that I am simply inserting a window into the opening of my protrusion - I'm guessing that a stand alone family would no longer be constrained to having to attach to a wall?

If I understand you, you are saying that my facade design should be recessed from the "wall" rather than extended as a protrusion. If this is what you mean, I simply misrepresented my design in the photo. In actuality, what you were seeing was technically the interior. I have attached a floor plan view which I think represents what you are trying to convey... Ignore the placed awning window on the interior (which confuses me since there is nothing but a void there and yet Revit recognizes a wall and allows a window to be inserted).

Here's a rather exaggerated version of what I'm seeing as the as-built condition -- a recess in the wall. Everything here is, but the Windows, are System Families (e.g. Walls and Floors). The OOTB Windows used are hosted to the back inset wall. This is how I interpreted what you described.

Three months ago I started working at Snhetta. On day one I was introduced to a project that a team of architects were already working on. The facade team on the project needed some assistance, and I started working on the outer skin.

The entire outer skin is a first class exercise in amazing visual programming and scripting for building information modeling and interoperability. Below follows a step-by-step recap of how the final result was produced. The summary excludes many of the mistakes I made, not out of pride but simply because the blog post would be too long.

The facade was a double facade, with the inner skin a simple climate curtain wall. The outer skin was set up with two 6 mm thick glass plates (Motherplanks), 1.34 m wide and 305 mm high, glued together and fastened to the inner facade with steel T sections spanning between the floors. On 50 % of the Motherplanks we glued glass C channel profiles (Reglits) with 4 different surface treatments, 4 different lengths, placed at different sides of the Motherplanks and flipped. On 33 % of the non-flipped panels we sandblasted the backside of the Motherplanks where the Reglits were placed.

Peter took charge one morning and called our Innsbruck office. Patrick Lth and his colleague Andreas Glatzl answered the phone and we immediately began discussing working with panel center points instead. Panel center points naturally work well with one-point Generic Model Revit families. These families are also faster than other Revit elements (like Adaptive Components for instance) and easy to standardize with Type Parameters.

To be able to control the amount of panel types, we had to create a system of nesting families. The Motherplanks were created as simple Face Based Extrusions with Shared Length, Width, Height and Material Parameters. The Reglits were also Face Based, but Sweeps based on predefined Profile families, also with Width, Height, Length and Material Parameters. In addition we needed an empty family for panel instances with no Reglit. All families were constrained to the tilting Reference Line, and in addition the Reglits were constrained to an offset Reference Line for changing the placement sides with integers.

Once all the points and numbers (angles) found their way into Dynamo it was only a matter of copying and changing file paths to extract all the data we needed to place panels on all 8 facades. There is a Dynamo node that will horizontally rotate a family instance, and we used that to align all the panels in plan. The vertical rotation had to be done with an Instance Parameter, changing the tilt of a set of Reference Lines in the panel family, and thus tilting the Nested Families.

That last procedure was dirty. Adding thousands of Cut Geometry relationships between Nested Families and imported and exploded SAT voids smells like trouble. It did work on this delivery, but it also did bloat the Revit Project file from about 30 to about 100 MB. It was awesome when we made it work, but I would not uncritically recommend the workflow on every design case.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. When you get to overcome the seemingly impossible, with edge cutting technology that makes your heart beat on a complex, challenging and beautiful building project together with fantastic people, you should smile. Now, I do.

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