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View Full Version : Can't see the wood for the trees.



David Conant
2003-08-29, 03:18 PM
Moved from "200+ Housing Scheme Campus Animation "

Trees, trees, trees. You can blame me for the trees shipped with revit.
I think the best strategy for 2d and shaded (as opposed to rendered) views is to use the same sorts of abstractions we would have used when drawing or building models by hand.
I have had good results by building tree families with symbolic elevation and plan representations. The elevation views can be imported dwg elements. Place or draw representations in the plan, and two perpendicular elevations. If drawn, use symbolic lines. If imported, import into current view only (this makes the import work like symbolic lines). You now have a tree that will appear as you like in plan and most elevations (only those parallel to the x and y axes).
For a 3d representaton I prefer to use a wire like construction so that the result is relatively transparent. You could try using partially transparent materials on a solid representation. This will create some additional load on shading since there are more faces to process. Just think of how you would build quick models trees on a real model and you may find other cool ways to make 3d abstractions.
To make the whole family parametric for height, save it and load it into another empty planting family. This new family will resize based on the plant height parameter. Hook up any AR plant you want in this family to get a rendered representation.

PeterJ
2003-09-01, 10:18 AM
Can you post an example of your preferred method, please, David.

PeterJ
2003-09-01, 04:28 PM
Ok I worked this one out myself in the end with a little trial and some error. I note that if you make the tree parametric for height, by nesting, it promptly resizes any plan representation too. So what I am doing is making the nested component free from any plan representation and adding the plan bits as symbolic lines in the 'enclosing family' that way I have something that will give an accurate height (which is generally more important in elevations) and an accurate spread on plan, though the two are not necessarily related to one another.

For the moment I have abandoned simple 3D representation, but they'll show if I render.

David Conant
2003-09-02, 02:06 PM
I have attached the 5.1 base files for the shipped trees so you can mess around with the wire frame representation. (these are the files that get loaded into the wrapper)
If you put the plan representation in the wrapper family, you can make it independently parametric from the height scaling, or if you want to be really clever, use a formula that relates height to spread. If you created a different family for each tree species, you could have pines whose spread = height/4 and oaks where spread = height/1.2. Whether you can make your plan rep parametric will depend on how complex it is. Don't try a somewhat free form wiggly line, but something based on circles or arc sections may work. Have fun.

Vincent Valentijn
2003-10-01, 09:22 AM
Maybe Revit could include a few RCP trees in the next catalog? I just love the way it represents as only a single ploygon in your renderings, thus putting no extra strain on the rendering.