House Renders

 Somewhere in Invercargill, New Zealand:

House Renders

 A small house in Mosgiel....

A Concept for a steep site

 This was an actual paid job, the site was extremely narrow (about 6m) and on a steep hill. 

The client wanted the building to be against the northern boundary, so the design was driven mainly from the site, as in this plan:

The elevation shows that the design is just 3 box like shapes going down the hill:

The client did not want concrete floors, so this had the effect of lifting the design to allow for inspection of the subfloor.

I did not put a huge effort into the renders, just ones from inside Revit and then pasting them on to pics of the site:

Competition Entries

 I have just been looking at my stats for this blog.  Not a lot of interest at around 50 views/blog.

Anyway, I have been doing competitions on Freelancer and have come to a point where it just is not worth putting effort into these.  

So a retrospective of what I have been doing might be nice, even if it was just for myself!

These are not the total I have done-just the more vaguely interesting. Each entry has on the average around 7 different views.

This is my latest one, which earned me a disappointing 2 stars, maybe it was a bit on the outrageous side...A German Apartment Building Reno.

By the way, all of these are modelled in Revit 2016, and sent as an fbx to Twinmotion (ie free!)

This next one is a granny flat for an Australian property.   This one is the outrageous version:

This is the same job, just a bit more conservative:

This one is a 3 storey building for Fiji:

This is a design for a chapel:

Yet another German house:

A Kuwait Lobby:

Cyprus House:

Faroe Islands House:

A Floating Hotel:

Another German House:

Houseboat:

Kentucky House:

Malaysian House:

A Covid19 mask:

This Perth House won a prize:

A Mausoleum:

A USA Winery:

Site Measures ,Presentation of Elevations and Snaps

Site Measures

After much pain, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. If there are site dimensions to be measured, get the guy who is going to be drafting to do the site measures.

2. If he thinks 2 hours might do, multiply this time by 3 and tell him you are fine with however it might take.  Never skimp on time for site measures.

3. Do NOT TRY TO FIT A WHOLE HOUSE ON ONE A4 SHEET!  Apologies for the caps, but this cannot be stressed enough.  Make it one room per A4 sheet.(Letter in USA).  The number of times I have been handed illegible microscopic scribbles......&****@@@!

4. Take photos. Lots of them, from as many different angles as you can. In my experience, there is always about 5 views I wish they had taken.

5. If you are doing a string of dimensions, do an overall one to check that they add up to the overall, which means taking a calculator to site. 

Presentation of Elevations

On a recent job, I thought, yippee, let's push the boat out and have shadows on and ambient shading and turn on realistic.  Fine if you have a colour printer, but not if they are printed out, as they come out quite dreary and dark looking.

A better alternative is to leave shadows off and just have ambient shadows.

As the building had board and batten cladding it seemed originally a good idea to have the rendered appearance to show the board and batten.  Turns out a much sharper result is obtained by using surface hatching.  Revit does not have a board and batten hatching, but you can download one of these patterns.

I found one, and a shout out here to Robert Cloward, who posts these for free. Thanks Robert.

Here is the contents of one, to view, just change the file extension to .txt and use the text editor to look at it and maybe vary it's contents: 

;%VERSION=3.0

;%UNITS=INCH

;;

;;

;;     Custom hatch pattern by Robert Cloward

;; December 2007

;;

;;

*B&B-12x1, Batt & Board 12 in board 1 in spaces

;%TYPE=MODEL

90, 0,0, 0,12

90, 1,0, 0,12

This turned out to have 1" wide boards about 12" apart.  Not what I wanted, so I turned the 1 to a 2 and the 12 to an 8.  Then resave the file as a .pat file.

Snaps

I have never taken much notice of these, consequently a lot of my drawings are not terribly accurate. In a bout of Revit frustration I opened up the snap dialog and the source of all my wrong doing became apparent.....ALL SNAPS ARE ON!  In an Autocad world many years ago, I had a routine that turned on a few snaps on and all was reasonably accurately done.  Then I worked at a place where a man had every snap turned on.  Yup, he was a lot faster, but not very accurate.

I see from the dialog box you can turn on a particular snap, say midpoint by typing SM in the middle of the command, so I am going to try setting mine to just endpoints and midpoints and dialling up any others as I go for a while.

Custom Elevation Markers and Large Site Drawings

Well, here we are in 2021 and I am still finding some work, albeit a bit spotty,  hence I have the day off today.  As well as the last 5 days.

Elevation Markers

On one of my jobs, the Licensed Building Professional who gets to sign off my work (I live in New Zealand and you cannot submit work unless you are a Licensed Building Professional) wanted me to change my elevation marker from the Revit out of the box one, namely:

Because I felt under pressure to get stuff out, I fired back a message saying it could possibly be changed, but I would take and hour just to figure out how to change it, and could we please leave it as it is?

His reply:

" I've noticed similar limitations with ArchiCad and other programs used in my old office - that one is limited in terms of notes, detail tags etc & drawing presentation is dictated by the program itself which is why prefer to stick to Autocad for drafting - if i can't get my plans to look the way i want them then who controls who - a program controls me or I control the program?

You can see my point?

These flash programs are def good for 3Ds and animation but i'm still not convinced when it comes to consent plans & working drawings which is why I stubbornly stick to good old Autocad"

So with some spare time, I tried to modify an apparently simple little item.

After some nasty warning dialog boxes as I moved down a track that Revit obviously disapproved of, I saved the drawing under a new name that had "test" in it!

It turns out that the marker is composed of two pieces:

1. The body, ie the circle

2. The pointer, which is a separate file.

You can modify both, just save them under new names.

My mistake was to try and rearrange the item number in the arrow family so it might turn up in the right place.  Wrong!  The correct plan is to delete the number off the arrow completely.

Then in the body, add this as a label so it displays above the sheet number, which you move down and put in a line to separate the two.

As in the following:

Which is great, except that now for some reason the arrow is not filled.  After much puzzlement and looking, the solution to that was to go into the family, and delete the existing filled region, and draw in a new one.  Go figure!

Here we are, success at last:

Large Site Drawings

On another job, another different architect had already drawn his development of 14 homes on one property.  This was split into two buildings, one of 4 apartments and the other of 10.

The 10 unit block was on 3 different levels and the 4 apartments on yet another set of levels.

All I had to do was a few sections and a few details so he will be able put it in to Council for Building Consent.  A typical Bill estimate would have been 40 hours. 

Ever heard of the Bill factor? If Bill says it will take 4 hours, to get the actual time taken, multiply this by the Bill factor, usually 5, so in this example, it would be 4x5=20 hours.

He wisely never asked me how long I might take!.  Well, 2/3 done at the moment, and nearly 100 hours have gone by.  Part of this is my fault: I have modeled every stick of wood in the roof of the 4 unit block. A mistake I will not make for the larger block.

I found much of my time wasted tripping over the levels of the other block.  This is a bit of a dilemma: do you split such a development into two separate projects, making mixing of levels not an issue?  Then how to join them up together again, with details etc being common across the two projects? Then printing out two separate files and joining the pdfs together?

Another hassle was Key Notes.  I had not used these before, but I can see they are definitely a wonderful thing.  The idea is you have a text file, kept separate but in the same directory as the drawing  This is a tab delimited file containing all your Key Notes.  Great idea, just not that much fun formatting the bits as they arrive in your sheet.  Yes, you can split them so they can be spread across your page, but the final format looks a bit clunky. 

The architect has seen them and is not accepting of their formatting.  They will have to be redone as pieces of text. 

Not only that, but it seems you cannot (at least as far as I can find) use these in conjunction with detail views. No doubt on the Revit Kid's wish list?

Another fun, time consuming rabbit hole was trying to do the sanitary piping, which required the old dog to learn the new trick of Revit piping.  A quite impressive part of Revit, it just needs a lot of fiddling around loading plumbing fittings.

Yet another mad item was bracing grid lines. I thought, why don't I use the grid item to do

these? WRONG!  Every plan view I had (and there were lots) , sprouted these durn grid lines.

The only way out was to hide items in the views.  Hours later....

Ray Phillips Hall, at 41 Elliot Street, Papakura, Auckland, New Zealand, Addition

 Ray Phillips Hall, at 41 Elliot Street, Papakura, Auckland, New Zealand.

Just a bit of background: This hall has 6 courts.  At one stage some enthusiasm was mustered towards the building of another 5 courts. 

Unfortunately, funding did not quite meet the expected cost, so the idea was shelved, and the funds raised were put in an account, not to be touched, to await the day when it may be possible to raise enough capital to make it happen.

As a player at the hall (The Papakura Ladies Day Badminton Club, yes, I know but they allow men to play!), I was talking to someone and somehow this idea came up: Why not use the money to have a partial add-on?

The ideas mentioned were a kids area, a proper commercial kitchen, a seating area and the ability to watch games from a different angle.

The whole idea of these plans is as a starting point.