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…