Bamboozled!

[christo4robin]

I need some bamboo for a project. I don't see it in the existing Revit/Accurender files. I do see it listed in the latest plant library at the Accustudio website.

Question--where do I unzip all the files to? What paths do I need to set in Revit?

Thanks!

[beegee]

Copy the library files to a new sub folder ( not necessary, but recommended ) in the folder where your materials are kept.

Go to Settings/Options/Rendering Tab/ add that sub folder as a new file location on the bottom of the window.

Restart Revit and there she'll be.

[christo4robin]

Far too easy. Far, far too easy.

Thanks BeeGee!

[beegee]

Oh OK, ..... well we can always bump up the degree of difficulty to make it more exciting next time.

How about we print replies in Dutch ?

[Steve_Stafford]

Too easy, Vincent will translate for him...try oh...say Australian...hehe

[beegee]

Too hard, no one but we Wallaby supporters will understand.

eg

Sitting at home last Sunday morning me mate boomerang said he was having a few friends around for a barbie, said he might kookaburra or two. I said "Will wallaby be there ?" He said " Yeah, and vegemite come too ". So I said to the wife, " You wanna goanna ?" She said , "I'll go if dingoes." I said to Boomer, " Wattle we do about Nulla ?. He said " Nullabors me to tears, leave him at home. "

[hand471037]

careful with some of those Accustudio plants. In my experance some of them, when you would go to edit them with the Accurender plant editor, would crash it; esp the bamboo. don't know why this was, and it could have been particular to my machine... but just take heed that if you need to edit a plant with the plant editor to save your work prior!

[ajayholland]

I introduced Westfield Corp. to Revit by modeling and animating a large atrium area that is part of a 225,000 S.F. addition to one of their "shoppingtowns". So when the designers asked if some interior landscaping could be added to the walk-through animation, naturally I said, “Yes!” (It’s in the script, JB.)

The 30 to 40 foot high atrium will have several 3' x 6' floor wells thickly planted with bamboo up to 25 feet high. I've downloaded the latest Accustudio libraries, but found only two varieties that do not adequately match the Phyllostachys Henon variety specified by the landscape architect. Ditto with RPC content.

Before I immerse myself in the Accurender plant editor this weekend, does anyone out there have any additional resources or any recommendations?

-AJH

[hand471037]

Your probably gonna have to make it. There are many plants in Revit already, however Landscape Architects seem to love to spec the craziest plants they can find... which of course you don't have any of in your library. We just went thought this with a landscape rendering where we only had about 20% of the plants that were spec'd, and had to fake the rest.

Best bet would be to take the Bamboo that's already made, and play with it to see if you can make it more like what you need. The plant editor isn't hard to work with, but it is *very* complex, so it can take a fair amount of time to make a decent looking plant from scratch...

Also be careful, for the Accurender plant editor love to crash, and will take Revit with it sometimes. What I do is open a blank project, make the plant there, and then load it into my project. But now with the better computer I got, this might not be such an issue. :) but this was the case with my older machine, which wasn't too strong.

[beegee]

The plant editor isn't hard to work with, but it is *very* complex.

I'm just going to think about that statement for a while Jeffrey.
Personally, I find the plant editor a real "black box."

[hand471037]

What I mean is that while the plant editor is easy to understand on a base level, there are so many options to do so many different things that it quickly gets overwhelmingly complex.

It goes base->branches->more branches->leaves & fruit. :) simple huh?

At each step we choose how we want the branching to act, so that our plant 'grows' from a base to the end leaves.

So, if you were starting from scratch, you would first define the base; so if it's a plant/bush you'd make that base have many branches; you would pick how wiggly they get, how thick are they, do they come to a point or not, how long are they in proportion to the whole plant, how they group as they grow away from the base (do they bunch together? do they randomly spread out? do they all grow upwards?), how many branches come out of that base point, and how they 'spin' out (are they random? are they a spiral? are they symetric?). If it was a tree you'd make a single 'trunk' (which is really just a single big branch) at this step, and move to the next.

Next you define the next level of branching; if it was a plant/bush, you might not need to do this, and just define leaves at this point, or maybe just a single level of branching. This you repeat the same as the base, except that rather than all the branches coming from a centrial point at the base, they would grow off of the branches you just defined in the last step (head hurt yet... just wait).

They you repeat this until you get the branching that you want. Again, if you're making a catus, tree, or bamboo, it just might be one or two levels of branching.

When you've got the branching you want, you then define the leaves and fruit. This you do the same way as the branching, 'cept that rather than it making a new branch, it takes a bitmap leaf/bunch of fruit and arranges it via the same set of rules as the branching. This should be the last thing you do.

If you were making a houseplant, that's all leafy and stuff, you might not even need to make branches, you might just have a group of leaves 'whorling' out from a center point and spreading outwards.

and stuff. whew. didn't mean to make this so long. So, the basic theory of the plant editor is that you, step by step, define how you want the plant to 'grow'. However there are so many options that it can prove to be increadbly daunting, don't let it be, start our really basic and easy, and get a feel for what the different options control, and you'll be fine. ;)

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, you can have settings for each season, so that the plant's branching, color, fruit, everything actually, changes according to season. So do what you just did three more times, altering the settings, to make a full season plant!

[beegee]

Wow, and I thought no one understood that stuff !

Jeff, you just passed one of my tests for a Revit Geek ( see another forum )

Doya think we can get it to build Gehry type buildings too ? Who needs Catia.

Seriously ........ thanks.

[ACE001]

Did you make the large bamboo in like that in the picture? I would love to see it. I'm thinking of making one myself.

[ajayholland]

Did you make the large bamboo in like that in the picture? I would love to see it. I'm thinking of making one myself.

I did – but that was almost four years ago! I will see if it can be resurrected. (I save everything!)

~AJH

[jrostar]

That would be sweet if you were able to locate! I am needing some bamboo for a project and am having no luck at all finding something that will work!

[SkiSouth]

the 2006 plant library at accustudio has golden and black bamboo as plant types. Go to www.accustudio.com, plants, download library and put in support subdirectory of Revit. You'll have to restart revit for accurender to find the new library.

[truevis]

You could also try to use decals (photos of the plants) with transparencies on faces of clear extrusions.

Remember SketchUp imports.

[SkiSouth]

Use the "void" material for the "clear" extrusion if you choose this route. Its a material furnished in the default accurender library.

[ajayholland]

I dusted off some old CDs and discovered a directory named Bamboo! However upon examining its content I realized that all the information for the work I did is actually contained in the Accurender ‘mlib’ file, which I failed to retain. All I have is the attached image as proof of my efforts.

Perhaps Troy G. can search through any of the files I left at Westfield, but I suspect that everything was contained on a local drive, since I was the only Revit user at the time (2003).

Also, Jeffrey McGrew’s 11-20-03 post in this thread was the source of information for the work. It may be helpful to others.

~AJH