Masonry Arch Lintel

[r.grandmaison]

Not sure if this is the right forum, or Families, Workaround or Rendering, but here it goes anyway.

I need to make a parametric opening that creates arched masonry lintels above the opening. I've got the opening all figured out, but the masonry arch is giving me issues regarding the material mapping. I tried to take advantage of the way blend-sweeps warp material/texture patterns and it almost works, so I'm thinking some Revitbrainiack can solve the rest of this riddle for me or at least point me in a different direction. Oh- and I would rather that "direction" not be one that involves the use of decals!

So, I'll be posting pictures showing what I've done so far...the first picture in elevation shows EXACTLY what I want and was done entirely in Revit...but alas, if you look at the actual model you'll see in subsequent pictures that, while the material maps perfectly in elevation view, the actual lintel had to be "warped" by playing with the flip checkbox for the blend/sweep profiles- and rotated in the material editor by 1 degree as well- resulting in a lintel that sticks out of the wall at one end. It looks fine in true elevation- but horrible in other views. And even then the pattern in elevation is only correct on one side of the blend-sweep, not on any of the other surfaces.

Anyone come up with a sure-fire remedy to this? Is there a good workaround that doesn't require too much user manipulation after dropping this kind of family into a wall?

[Alfredo Medina]

Bob,

I can help you with the modeling part, and then you continue with the other rendering part. I can't help you much with that mapping issue. See if this arch opening (attached rvt) works fine for you as a starting point. To test it, select the opening and look into the "Construction" set of parameters within the Properties dialog box. Try changing the "# of Bricks width" or the "# of Bricks height". I don't have a parameter for the sill height, so you need to use the "Elevation" parameter of the opening. Use the Brick Height parameter to figure out the proper elevation. I hope it helps.

[r.grandmaison]

Bob,

I can help you with the modeling part...I hope it helps.

Thank you Alfredo. I have the modeling/opening all figured out- I took a slightly different approach than you did but it works fine. It has two types in it and I'd customize the available types on a project level basis once we get the field documentation done to verify the actual existing variants. I took out the blendsweep, but I'm attaching my take on it for you comparison.

I've thought about different ways to approach the lintel material mapping. And here are the two I'm going to look at, though I would prefer if I could simply force the correct mapping onto the arch blendsweep.

1. Do the whole decal thing by bending the courses in PS, then creating the opacity map for the cutout on the decal...place the decal manually and resize atop the lintel...but, it's a lot of manipulation and tweaking to get it right I'm sure.
2. Create a material that uses a "radial" group of bricks and map it onto the lintel. The problem is that I'd have to manually adjust the location of the texture and probably create a new image for each type of radius/arch rise. Think of this as dropping a "dart board" made of bricks on thee surface.

Any other ideas?

[Alfredo Medina]

Bob, I thought you still had some issues with the modeling, based on the hidden lines 3D view that you posted, where the arch was going off the wall, instead of remaining parallel to it. Did you fix that part?

[r.grandmaison]

Bob, I thought you still had some issues with the modeling, based on the hidden lines 3D view that you posted, where the arch was going off the wall, instead of remaining parallel to it. Did you fix that part?

Well, I can get the blend sweep to adhere to the plane of the wall, but when I do the materials do not map in the fanshape of the sweep. They instead revert back to a standard horizontal running bond pattern.

There really needs to be a way of telling materials, perhaps from inside the material editor itself, to "wrap" to the physical shape of the object it's applied to!

What I'm hoping is that some Revit expert in materials, can find a clever way to exploit the profile "flips" or the "edit vertex" of the sweep to allow the materials to map just as it should in real life.