Curtain wall performance

[Steve Jager]

I am currently working on a 24 story hotel project with full curtain walls.

Has anyone else done large curtain wall projects yet?

Setting the grids is ok timewise, but when you try to set the mullions all at once, forget it! It could quite possible take hours! You cannot use the arrary tool on mullions, it doesn't work.

I even tried setting one mullion line at a time, slow and at best tedious.

Am I missing something or is this how curtain walls perfom at this time?

I have dual proc, 1 gig ram machine.

Try a test. Draw a curtain wall 300 ft l and 260 ft high with twenty floors and set up your grids and mullions and tell me if I am doing something really wrong.

[Allen Lacy]

If you're using 6.0, there's a curtain wall that has grids built in it (curtain wall:exterior glazing). You can change grid spacing to suit you needs.

[Wes Macaulay]

Build each storey of curtain wall, then group it, then copy it up. If you need to make a change, ungroup one set of curtain walls, edit, regroup under a different name, and then swap the old groups for the new one.

[JamesVan]

I've run some curtain wall tests with 6.0 and have not had any performance issues. I am running Revit on an IBM ThinkPad T40 with 1 Gb of RAM and I actually am impressed with the pickup of the mullions on an entire wall.

[jbalding48677]

We used a technique where we only used Revit "in-place" mullions at the floor lines and room divisions. The rest of the mullions we created in a curtain panel. This allowed us to avoid breaking up the mullions individualy, allowed us flexibility on a global scale to change panel layouts and materials not to mention swapping out panels. Actually there really isn't a down side to it...

The attached images should help you understand.

[sbrown]

I just did your test and you are right the performance is awful, I think its because revit is creating literally 1000's of little pieces for that size curtain wall. Now if I do what Jim and I did on the hotel it will go very quick, figure out the largest repeating grid you can and create it in the family editor as a panel with built in mullions then just swap out the system panels for your new panel and it will go very quick.

[Steve Jager]

Thanks for all the replies. We are going to try them all and see what fits best for our situation.