BILT Speaker

BILT Speaker
RevitCat - Revit Consultant

Thursday 28 November 2013

Geometric Patterns from Parametric Revit Stars

In my previous post I showed how to make a parametric star in Revit - one that has a variable number of points.  Here are some examples of how that might be used in a parametric pattern.  I have shown something a little like this previously and also in my RTC 2012 presentation, but that was done using a fixed number of points in the star, although it changed shaped parametrically.

Repeater Star Patterns in Revit

Since the parametric stars are made as adaptive components, they can be placed on a node of a divided surface (in a conceptual mass or another adaptive component)
Once the star has been placed it can be arrayed using the "Repeater" command to form a geometric pattern
 
By changing the radius of the circular rig in the adaptive star, it changes the size of the star and hence the pattern
  Once the stars overlap it gives a completely different effect

 
Going back to the original size, the number of points on the star can be changed.  however, a five pointed star does not result in an interesting pattern once they overlap each other.  Likewise, 4 or 3 pointed stars don't look good (crosses and triangles)
Increasing the number of points to seven, does work reasonably well, although it looks a bit messy as the overlap increases!
  


 An eight point star works well on a square grid pattern:




You can also change the background grid on the divided surface.  In this example one of the grids is rotated by 30 degrees:

The resulting patterns can be triangular or hexagonal in nature:
 Just by changing the size of the star (radius of underlying crcle) you can get radically different patterns.








I hope that someone finds a use for this flexible way to create parametric patterns in Revit (2013 or later).

3 comments:

  1. Very Nice !!! I have a collection of Islamic Patterns that I picked up somewhere, some of which are very similar to these. Maybe this could yield another method for creating scalable musharabiya screens ... a topic I revisit from time to time. Thanks Tim

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andy, I thought you might like these patterns. I'm sure you could use this method to create scalable musharabiya screens - especially if you use my technique of nesting repeaters on curtain panel pattern families to get Revit to trim around the edges for you.

    ReplyDelete