Adding individual brick to wall exteriors w/ advanced capabilities

[Margarita]

I work for a precast concrete engineering company. Some of our projects involve architectural wall panel jobs in which we are responsible for showing all of the brick layouts on our panels.

Has anyone done something like this using Revit? So far I know of two ways, neither especially great. The first is just applying a brick material - but this does not allow for the brick count which is essential. The second is I made a detail component and it can be arrayed - but I have not been able to make it "smart" enough to notch at openings and cut brick.

If anyone has any suggestions or past experiences they would be willing to share, I'd love to hear from you.

[jeh.212740]

Hello,

You can try utilizing a material schedule and have a calculated value to get a semi accurate brick count. Utilize material: area as you base for this cacluation as it will take in account the wall penetrations such as windows and doors.

Good Luck!

[greg.mcdowell]

For the detail component idea to work you'll need more than the one family. Make additional families for the odd/edge conditions. Place these first as appropriate and then use your original detail component between them arraying as necessary. You could use some custom parameters in order to get them all on the same line in a schedule or list them separately... after all, two half bricks equal a whole brick!

[patricks]

I don't know if I've ever seen a mason cut a brick in half to use at the end of a run and then use the other half somewhere else.... they usually just toss the other half in the waste pile :roll:

[Margarita]

Thanks all. Sounds like I need to be content with what I have created to date. Currently, I have a brick family which allows me to input dimensions for the brick and also has the ability to "notch" it out for me. My take off schedule is also able to then pull the dimensions/notch dimensions out for a fairly accurate count.

I was just curious if there was a BETTER way. Or a MORE EFFICIENT way.

[tomnewsom]

Sounds like you're doing it the right way to me.

[mthurnauer]

You could at least deal with the field of brick by making a family that will array a running bond of brick in both directions. You could then stretch this family to fit the field and then place cut bricks where required. This could then give you a schedule of total bricks, cut bricks, the dimension of cut bricks, special corner units, etc.