Bi-Fold doors. Parametrics for opening and closing 3d panels by percentage?

[slejj]

Hello everyone. I have a question about opening and closing parametric bi-fold doors so that the 3d panels are operable for views. I want to be able to open and close the 3d panels via percentage. I have placed the bi-fold door family within a curtain wall system as the curtain wall panel (Will this be an issue?) The door I am currently using has 4 door panels.
Ideally I would like to create the option to fold the door panels 2+2 or 4+0, with percentage opening between closed and 100% open.
Would be so grateful if someone could help me. There are no tutorials posted on the web currently that cover this.

Thanks
Slejj.

[Alfredo Medina]

Welcome to the forum. Just out of curiosity, why do you want the bi-fold doors to be able to open in 3d views? Is it really worthy to add more features to the door? The family is already close to 1 mb.

[slejj]

It is worthwhile as the façade of the 12 level building is made completely of bi fold doors. A view that shows them open and closed would be really useful. Do you know how I might go about it?

[Alex Page]

I gave up making doors opening since if you do it without different object styles (ie: open panel on one subcategory, closed panel on another), one cannot have them open in 3d and closed in elevation, which is generally what one wants - and if you do do it through object styles for a new user it looks like an absolute mess (ie: views with door panels closed AND open). This is what I do instead: Either
1: Just turn off the door subcategory panel and glass in the view, that turns off all the panels (project wide) - it doesnt "open" them, it removes them! Quite often this will do
2: If I really want to show them in the open view I 'save-as" the familiy, hack the new family so the panels are in the correct position and then swap them with the correct family - this does mean they are not very parametric, but its easy and it does the trick.

[damon.sidel]

Well, I was going to ask a similar question about why, but being able to have the parameters you want would help for visualization. I'll give it a shot to see if I can make it work. Adding this functionality shouldn't increase the file size since it should be the same amount of geometry. One thought before I see if I can get it to work: you could add a few panels as various percentages and have some visibility settings to control them. You could probably even tie the visibility settings to an angle parameter. That would probably be easier to implement but would add a lot of geometry.

[LP Design]

I have attached a family that should help you get started. This one is set up with the 3D panels only which are visible in plan. So if your doors are open in 3D they are open in plan and vise-versa. It is certainly possible to modify and add a 2D plan representation of a bifold with a separate control. I do this with all of my regular swinging doors. That would allow you to show them open in plan but closed in 3D.

One other thing, this family is set up based on the door swing angle, not a percentage. Again, you could make this change but I don't really think it is necessary. 90° = fully open, 45° = 50% open.

Hope this helps,
-LP

[giorlando190891]

Has anyone else noted that a 45 % swing angle does not give a 50% opening? Much less. Maybe this is just academic but it would benice to be able to have the model conform to/ report the actual opening percentage. Unfortunately the math of relating the real door swing angle to the opening percentage is actually quite difficult. Geometrically it is easy if you base your radius on the diagonal of the door (the hypotenuse of the width and thickness) but trying to generate your model geometry this way busts Revit all to pieces. It is much more difficult to find the coordinate x and y positions algebraically, which would be stable in Revit. Has anyone actually done this?

[david_peterson]

You can always try this method.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UhAHxq5CGg