Category Revit

Dynamo deletes previously placed elements after each run – workaround

zhukoven Leave a comment

If you need to iteratively place multiple Revit elements with Dynamo, like these stadium chairs, then you are in trouble. The problem comes from element binding – a Dynamo feature which preserves the link between DesignScript and Revit elements during the current Dynamo session. This is how Dynamo works by design, preventing your model from an avalanche of element duplicates, created in ‘Auto’ mode:

DynamoBindingOn

Either you run the graph in ‘Auto’ mode (like in the figure above), or re-run the graph manually, Dynamo places new elements while removing previously created ones. This kind of behaviour sounds pretty logical and straightforward – look what you’ll get if there’s no element binding at all (using one of the workarounds):   Continue reading “Dynamo deletes previously placed elements after each run – workaround” →

Revit 2018.1 update comes with enhanced Dynamo Player

zhukoven Leave a comment

Good news, everyone! Revit 2018.1 update is now available for download from the Autodesk Account portal. It comes with some cool new features (see this article at Autodesk blogs for the full info), including enhancements to Dynamo Player. Now it finally supports changing input values directly through the Player UI, which is super handy:

Dynamo_Player_update_2018.1

As you can see, there may be plenty of inputs that could be changed without even launching Dynamo. But note that there are still some limitations:

  • Code blocks as input strings are not  supported – if you prefer to write text inputs in code block, using quotes, you’ll need to rebuild these Dynamo graphs (swap Code Blocks with Strings) to use with Player;
  • Custom nodes as inputs are not supported – they are not shown in the Player UI;
  • Frozen nodes will be shown as changeable inputs, while they’re not used in the script logic.

Anyway, this is a cool update, and I’m sure that these subtle issues would be fixed in the near future. And by the way, here is the quote from Dynamo community addressing these issues:

We will look into the frozen node and address them in the future.
For the Code Blocks it’s a little more tricky but doable if there is a strong request from the community.
For the custom nodes it would be really nice indeed to have that.
The way I see this as a possibility in the future : a third party will create the custom node on Dynamo and then will have to create the node UI representation in Dynamo Player ( using some Dynamo Player API which doesn’t exist yet ). So the third party will have control over the DB level of the node and also over node UI representation in Dynamo Player.
Good news is that things are designed internally to make this possible in the future.
However , since this still requires a significant development effort we need to have a strong request from the community so that decision factors prioritize this accordingly. So please tweet about it on every occasion !

Unable to apply scope box to Revit view

zhukoven Leave a comment

Yet another post about Revit weirdness… Struggling with setting scope boxes to multiple views via Dynamo, I noticed that some of the views returned the “null” values. I opened the view that had a “null” value, and saw that the “Scope Box” parameter was grayed out:

ScopeBox grayed out

The reason for this weird behaviour is simple: it turned out that Scope Box parameter becomes read-only if you modify the Crop Cregion sketch. Since the Revit Scope Box is a cube, it can’t be applied to those views that have non-rectangular Crop Region!

Continue reading “Unable to apply scope box to Revit view” →

Count railing balusters in Revit with Dynamo

zhukoven 1 Comment

Counting something in Revit seems pretty easy, right? You’re able to extract lots of parameters from different element categories out of the box, and use them to create schedules or count quantities. This concept works great until you get to the system families. They usually make you scratch your head and turn your eyes towards Dynamo to get things done…

Say, we want to schedule the number of balusters by railing types. How are we supposed to count things like this?

Railings

The first thing that comes in mind – is to create a Railing schedule and check out available fields. And that’s when the first obstacle comes in your way: there’s no such thing as “Baluster” in the railing schedule:

The next step is to check railing instance or type parameters. Still, nothing useful here but baluster placement, that obviously can’t help us count the number of elements. Well, what if we check out available parameters in Dynamo?

Continue reading “Count railing balusters in Revit with Dynamo” →

Using Revit scope box to change intersecting elements parameters

zhukoven Leave a comment

Scope Boxes in Revit are very handy when dividing building into separate blocks. You can set these scope boxes in view properties, or even in view templates, and get cropped views in a matter of seconds. Yet there’s another handy thing that could be used to boost your productivity: the “Name” parameter, which by the way is the single available parameter of the scope box. So how can we use it?

Say, we’d like to divide our Revit model into blocks, using some distinctive names: “Block A”, “Block B”, etc. Using the named scope boxes, we can set this name to all desired elements that intersect the scope box:

SetParameterValuesByScopeBox.dyn

Continue reading “Using Revit scope box to change intersecting elements parameters” →