Creating Quick Design Options

[sam.tom0086]

So I am currently working on a large campus of several buildings that are going to have their exteriors updated with ribbed/smooth metal siding as well as possibly several instances of hardie board planking. I've been tasked with devising a quick way to cycle each wall that is going to be updated through those wall types so that we can come up with several options to present and visualize accurately and quickly. I immediately disregarded the idea of "painting" a material to each one though I like the idea of coming up with possibly wall hosted elements that populate the wall based on the geometry of the wall face.

Basically, I'd just appreciate help going in the right direction. Do I create some kind of family that has parameters for sweeps/voids which populate the wall face or do I create the wall type and "join" them to each wall? Is there a smarter, more effective way to do this? We are trying to think of something that is time efficient but also models these exterior skins in three dimensions so that shadow lines and masses are accurate.

Also this is my first post, so please be kind.

[david_peterson]

I'm not even sure where to start with this one. Also not 100% sure I fully understand what you're looking to do.

If you have several different designs for the skin of the buildings, you could look at design options. You'd be able to quickly swap each design option using VG. But again this assume you know what each design looks like.
And I'm not sure that's the case.
Are you trying to figure out what you want each option to look like or just are you trying to show each option that you already have a design for? It'd be really hard to come up with some routine or Dynamo graph to swap things out, unless you were trying to go totally random.
So I guess I'm not sure what you're looking to do just yet.

[sam.tom0086]

Sorry if I wasn't clear and thank you for the quick reply. We're looking to cycle through different finishes to determine the design options. We aren't sure of what each option looks like yet and need a way to cycle through different combinations of facade. Essentially, we're looking for a way to allow our designer to say, "Let me see what this facade looks like with X skin and this one with Y" and for us to be able to quickly cycle those. I know the answer is probably to bust out the trace and have them come up with different combinations there but we were spit-balling about whether there might be a workflow we could find that allowed us to combine and rearrange materials in real time. I'll look into maybe posting a picture or two to explain further if you feel that may help.

[david_peterson]

Well if you're looking at swapping one wall finish for another that's not bad. But if you're not even sure which walls would need to change then you're kinda out of luck.
ie if you want to change all of wall A to Wall B then you could have a process. But if you want to take swap Some of wall A and some of Wall B to Say wall C and then some of wall C for some of wall A or B, then I don't know of any magic bullet you can use to do that with, because you're looking at chaos. There's no pattern to it, no way to really sort an option.
If you had a way to sort them, you could make it work. Short of that, copy the model 500' to the left and make changes, rinse and repeat.
Unless you used a curtain wall system and wanted truly random results. You can do that with Dynamo and change them on the fly. But it doesn't sound like that's the case.

[sam.tom0086]

We know which walls will be changing, and they will be either entire walls or chains of walls. We are just wanting to play around with how our material palletes can combine in different ways. There is an existing structure that will be updated with new facades and we want to take some of the solid walls and change them to reflect the different facade materials on a instance by instance basis. The key is we want this to happen rapidly enough to where we can map out different combinations and options on a fairly rapid time scale (i.e. a few hours). So far the best I've come up with is to create a new phase, join a wall type in that phase to the faces of walls that will be changing and develop wall types to reflect the different material options and cycle through them that way.