Curtain Grid by Mass in 2010 - Unpredictable

[bregnier]

I'm coming across several problems making a complicated series of angled curtain panels in Revit 2010.

1)It appears that the face normals of some adjacent panels are different. Some corner conditions have the mullions on the wrong side of the glass (see image 2)

2)There appears to be no way to tell Revit which side of an individual panel is the horizontal, beyond a manual angle offset. This is frustrating as it occasionally makes the wrong decision. (See image 1). In addition when I do manually rotate the grid it is for some reason changing the location plane of the glass, putting it outside of the curtain wall!

3) Many of the perimiter mullions are doing strange things. The mullion family is set to stay horizontal, and this is only happening in some cases. In other places the glass is stopping short of the bottom mullion, leaving a gap.

I've tried sloped glazing but it's not cleaning up great and really isn't an appropriate solution. I'm about ready to either do a lot of in place mullion work, or install the 2009 UI and try curtain system by lines. Anybody want to convince me otherwise?

[bregnier]

I'd love some insight on how the curtain grid interacts with masses. Attached is a cleaned up project file... can anyone shed some light?

[bregnier]

Figured out that #1 and some of #3 was due to my attempting to set the curtain wall by face through offsets in the mullion and glass families.

A word to the wise - if you use curtain wall by face of mass, your curtain wall has to have it's control line at the center or your mullions will not clean up properly at the corners! What this means in practice is that if you have a slanted face of a mass with both curtain and conventional walls, you must have two faces, with one set back 1/2 the depth of the mullion, to get your wall to work out properly. Alternately you could make sure your conventional wall is the same depth and then place it by center, although that messes up the alignments I had set up in the mass to begin with.

It seems to me that best practice would be two separate masses, one for curtain system and one for solid walls, to keep everything clean and easy to edit. Curtain systems cannot have walls as panels, so the separation makes sense if you have lots of planes out of vertical...

Still having some problems where perimeter horizontals are perpendicular to glass instead of parallel to ground, and there is also the issue with not being able to set the primary grid orientation of a wall. If anyone has input or similar problems let me know.