Just a post on Posts

Well, here I am 6 months later and still not a Revit Guru.  Admittedly, I did have to shift house in there somewhere.  I downloaded the building suite stuff and had fun with Showcase- see my Youtube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y58uSkHQvgk

I am at the quite nice position now where I can watch a Revit video and say things like: "He should have done that in 3D", and "Does he not know to extend a fascia by the grip on the end?"
Then I look at some of the sites talked about below and realise, I am still around 40%.  It would be better to be around 80%.

I have dropped my resume at about 3 architectural practices here in my small town near Auckland.
No luck so far.  I cannot really blame them really, as they want people with about 1 -2 years experience.  With my yearly subscription rolling up in about 6 weeks, I may have to take the hard decision of pulling the plug on software upgrades.  I have the building suite - ie Autocad, Revit etc.

There seems to be quite a demand for such people at the moment, but the situation in NZ is by no means sure as we are not getting enough for our dairy produce to give a lively economy.

I find I am getting stuck on alleyways in Revit and going around in circles, because I do not understand the basic principles of modelling in Revit.

All the bits below came about because I wanted to draw a simple day light angle- the sort that goes up by 2m then back in at and angle of 45 degrees to give an allowable building envelope.

This led me to fences and topos :  all I want is to put a fence on a topo surface.  After much research, I found two different, but related techniques:

1. Use Dynamo to essentially draw a line in plan view on your topo and a fence magically appears.
You can check out this at http://plevit1.blogspot.kr/2015/04/railing-on-topography.html
This is a program by HyunWoo Kim, a Korean who seems to be immensely intelligent and a very clever user of Revit.  You do have to download the Dynamo file and the family it uses, and install Dynamo on your Revit as an add-in.

2. Draw mass on  top of your topo, then draw a reference curve on the edge where it intersects.  Then you Divide this curve into a series of points, in this case 2000mm.
You can check out this method at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ3KIgOyzkE
Again, you need to either download a family, or make your own.  This guy does a very good job of explaining himself as he goes along, producing a tube style handrail that does the job nicely.  At the end he shows the same method , but for a standard wooden fence this time.  Unfortunately there is no explanation of how the family was constructed, leaving me to struggle for 3 days on my own.

Time for a pic of one of the blind alleys:

As you can see the post ended up a bit tilted.  This could be useful one day?

Success came with much effort later:

Fence posts....Hooray!

After even more effort came:

Which is where I am going to declare a minor victory, though the picky might grumble that there are no planks or stringers shown.

All this is enabled through the creation of an adaptive family, which is used in  both of the methods mentioned above.

Easy enough to make after the explanation given in the Youtube videos, except for the panel bit.

In the end, I just banged in 4 reference points, then drew a model line using those points, and made a shape out of them , setting the extrusion value to 20mm.

In the end, I could not get the Dyanmo one to work on my topo, which I suspect is because my topo is 85m up off the ground level.  

The Dynamo one is definitely the quicker of the two, and I predict this is where Revit is heading to.

Have a look at HynWoo Kim's spanish tile roof demo - mind blowing!

Here it is: http://plevit1.blogspot.kr/2013/08/spanish-roof-tile.html