Non-ordinary walls then philosophy then tablets/flatscreens

[aghis]

This thread takes a detour off topic half way through but would be confusing to split so I've taken the unlikely approach to append the title and place this note, sorry for any confusion "Q"

I'm new in Revit 5.0. I use extensively ADT3.3 and ADT2004.
I have a question concerning non uniform walls.

Ex. A wall that has two components and one of them has a variable thikness. In ADT you can do this with "plan modifiers" or if the doforlation is in 3d you may use "Body modifiers".

doforlation = deformation...I think..."Q"

As I understand in Revit you may create a In-place Wall familly. However, the wall generated with this procedure has some problems:
1. with cleanups (with the other walls) and
2. it is not a configurable wall. I have to create a different familly for each particular wall in my plan.
3. If I have an Inclined surface, the windows do not follow the slope, they stay vertical...

Thanks for the advice

aghis

[gregcashen]

or if the doforlation is in 3d you may use "Body modifiers"

DOFORLATION? I am glad I don't use ADT!

[hand471037]

Actually, you wouldn't want to do this with a in-place family, I would think. You may better off making a new wall type consisting of those two layers, and just make different types for the different thicknesses you need. Seeing that you'll most likely only need a couple of widths, and how trivial it is to define a new wall type (it's very different from ADT's Styles), this should work well.

If you really need to have it be changeable on the fly, then you might want to look into making a parametrically-based generic family. If under the family settings you tell it it's a wall, it will clean up with other walls and such. The same is true for in-place families as well. The reason it's not is that you probably didn't tell Revit that your in place family is supposed to be a wall, and as such, Revit doesn't know how you want that thing defined/interacted with.

Jeffrey

[aghis]

Jeffrey,

I think that i did not express my self very well.
I send a jpg illustrating the kind of walls I would like to create for my project.
I would like to know if this is possible with Revit (I guess it is) and I would like to know if I will be able, whatever the form of the wall is, to change the components globaly for all the walls whether they are deformed or normal.
[/img]

[hand471037]

Yes, you can do this, and yes, you'll need to porbably use in-place families and/or elevation profiles.

Now, what is that added bit made out of? and what would you be changing about it? I still don't quite understand what it is that you are trying to do... Would only the 'backing' part be changing, or would the more random bits be changing too?

[aghis]

In ADT the deformation is attached to the individual wall, the "entity" not the style or the Family.
That way when you change the style all the walls of the same style in the drawing (either they have a deformation attached or not) reflect the changes.
This is important because you just have one wall style for let's say all the exterior walls of the project. It seems that in Revit I have to have a Family for each and every "deformed wall". In my case will make too many families, because I work often with old buildings in the historical centre of Paris that have a lot of non uniform walls.
I also start the project defining wall styles with one simple component of the total wall width and as the project is developed I refine the styles adding components within the width. As you may understand, in Revit I have to do this refinement for each and every wall family.

You may forgive the comparison between ADT and Revit. But I'm currently comparing the two products.

[Steve_Stafford]

I believe you could accomplish what you are after with in-place families for the protruded "window" treatments. A wall hosted family could be applied to create those, akin to a shutter or a column pilaster. As long as it was cut by the cut-plane it should wrap the thicker portion. I'd be inclined to create those in an elevation view and extrude them out from the face of the wall.

The curved wall type in the upper left corner of your image would be more difficult, but I believe that could be done with an in-place wall family extruded up from the ground to get the profile...can't say how the window would behave, guess I'd have to try it.

I'm sure there are other approaches...

[hand471037]

Yeah, I've heard about this being an issue for ADT people, that in that in Revit you can't redefine the thickness of a wall on the fly like you can in ADT.

The 'support' wall that the deformed bits are stuck too could be a simple wall family; and yes, while you would have to have a type for each thickness, it really is trivial to create those new types. Are you making whole new wall families rather than family types? You know that you can click the 'duplicate' button, give it a name, change the thickness, and be done?

Also, what are these walls made of to where no two are alike? I'm currently working on a building that's 150 years old (a drop in the bucket to you in Paris, I'm certian, but here in California that's really old!) and even it at least has two walls that were made the same way

Anyways; look into wall-hosted Families for the deformed bits, and custom in-place families (that are defined as walls under the 'Family Catagories' settings) for the 'backing' (or a long list of Wall Types), and you'll have what you want it sounds like.

Jeffrey

P.S. I've found that it's easyer for us to use Revit for Historic work, because it's much faster and easyer to make the custom objects that reflect the existing conditions, even if we have to have many many types for the different sizes. I can't imagine trying to do that in ADT; but then the last version I really did any work with was ADT 2 and so it's probably gotten easyer to make custom content. But still, I can't see how you get much of a return for all that time spent making custom styles and multiview blocks in ADT; also I would be concerned that only one person, the CAD manager, in the office would know how to do it, rather than anyone on the team able to when using Revit.

[aghis]

I'm not that sure that I understand very well how to use Families. If I want to create the first type of wall (on the left in the image) the one that has one of it's components deformed I pass through the create button. I choose as family type "wall" I draw the components on plan view according to the needed form and I extrude them. However the Result is close to what I want but I cannot change it's length or height parametrically (I can modify it's length or height only by modifying the family type) and the Windows are not applied on both components.
So in my case I have to do that for each specific wall, don't I? See attached file.

I have to agree that Revit is much easier to use and to learn than ADT.
I think that the non-layer organisation is rather interesting.
And of course the possibility in Revit to use only one unique file for all the levels of a building is something I appreciate very much specially for small buildings. (In ADT you have to have a separate file for each level)

However I find that there is very little help and tutorial resource available.

[hand471037]

OK, so I was able to make it parametric. In order to make it parametric, you have to lock your extruded shape to grids, ref. planes, or levels. Now it will stretch when those things move. Try it out. Also I locked it to a 'backer wall' like I was talking about, just to give you an idea of how that would work. See, the 'backer wall' is not an inplace family, but a wall made by the wall tool, and as such if you changed it's type perameters it would globablly change those walls.

As for your windows not working in the wall... well you need to make the Window families a little different in order to make them work. I'll get into it later, I've got to go now. But here's the file, it only took about 5 minutes to make it work.

> However I find that there is very little help and tutorial resource available.

Wha? You mean that there isn't very many books out yet? Revit comes with a huge amount of Tutorials, a huge help file, and there are on-line training classes that you can do too for free (or at least there were, don't know if AutoDesk has kept them) as well as a couple of very active areas for help. Do you feel like the included tutorials are bad? is that what you're saying? For there are a lot of them that come with the software... Are have they not been included with the Frendh Version? Not to be offesive, but just doing some of those basic tutorials would help you out a great deal, for some of the problems you are running into are kinda basic stuff.