Massing Groups to Populate Site?

[kurk]

Judging by the threads on groups that I have found I get the feeling I should be dismissing them in favour of other methods? perhaps creating separate files and linking them into the site file instead? Or maybe creating separate massing families??

Anyway I would like someone if possible to clarify my best option if I have a large hilly site that I want to populate with basic massing representations of two building types (Villa A & Villa B). I want to copy and rotate these two building types around the hills to produce a reasonably basic sun study and establish appropriate building locations.

I have tried creating a Massing Group of each type and copying it around in my project with the site model linked in to speed things up. However I have come across a number of niggling problems while doing this possibly due in some part to my novice techniques - eg group copies ok then goes awry when I rotate the copy (a constraint issue?).

Before I go much further though I would like to know which is the right or preferred way to achieve my goal? Groups? separate families? or separate files?

[sbrown]

Just make a massing family of the units, then copy that family around. We did that for a very large island site we were working on of apartment buildings, retail, single family homes,etc. Basically I created a site model, then numerous mass models of each building type, then loaded them in and copied, rotated and mirrored them as needed. You can even add parameters to the mass families so one family can be a 2 story apartment and another can be 5 stories.

[kurk]

Excellent, thanks for that Scott, i'm away laughing now...