The BIM TroubleMaker posted about making a parametric ellipsoid in Revit/ Vasari and Zach Kron posted his version of this. It was great timing as I was doing a comparison take on a similar type issue. Dezi was creating an elliptical shaped form in Rhino/Grasshopper that could represent an arena or stadium for her company and I thought I would do something similar in Vasari at the same time so we could compare.
I started with a generic adaptive component family, and created an ellipse family similar to the one Zach had shown.
I then loaded that into a mass family. In the mass family I created two splines, one on the XZ axis and one on the YZ plane. To create the splines I used Reference Points hosted to the two different vertical ref planes. I then used Spline by points to create the splines. I then created a vertical reference line at the intersection of the two reference planes.
When placing the ellipse family I hosted it to it to the vertical reference line created earlier. I then selected the placement points of the ellipse and picked the splines as new hosts. To copy the ellipse up I selected the adaptive point at the center of the ellipse. After copying that family up a few times I had the frame work for my mass building shape.
I decided that it would be nice to use the Vasari Sliders to adjust the mass so I added parameters to the reference points that made up the splines.
Once this was finished I created a Curtain Panel Pattern Based family that kind of represented a space frame, loaded that in to the mass and divided the surface. Another post on this later…
That is what I came up with.
I quickly changed the ellipse shape to a rectangle but kept all the same parameters, loaded that into the mass family and changed every other family to a rectangle added my space frame pattern to only a portion of the mass and came up with this shape…
Ran the wind loads from Vasari onto the entire mass and got this…
you should show this on Revit Radio.
Adam if we run out of questions I can. I have been showing this to Arhitectural and Structural firms in the Denver area.