Arranging and Flexing the panel on a surface

Now that I've got the panel I showed in the last post, and have flexed it a little in the family, I'm going to try it out on a form. First I make a revolved form and divide it.

Then load my new panel into it.

OK, but kind of looks like one of those fans for ventilating a lunch truck. So, to add a little pizzazz, lets monkey with the divide parameters a little. So if I rotate the grids 45 degrees, it starts to get more interesting.
But, because Revit does 360 revolves as 2 elements, I have these funky edge conditions on a form that really shouldn't have ANY edges. F**K!
So, the shape that I'm really going for is a rhombus.
But I've got a pattern based on a rectangle pattern. Do I have to rebuild my whole #%$'ing family!
Actually, no. The rhombus pattern is a 4 point panel, rectangle is a 4 point panel. So I can PATTERN the surface as a rhombus, and then swap all the PANEL INSTANCES with a rectangle: load a rhombus family, right click on it, pick "select all pattern components" and then in the type selector, pick the louver family. Voila!

Nice clean edges now and better control over panel sizes. Maybe someday I'll rebuild my panel family as a rhombus, when deadlines aren't looming, or I'm stuck on a plane to Vegas and the movie they're showing sucks. Maybe. In the meantime, this works. Now I can load this into a project file, schedule panels, make floors, render, etc.

[Edit: I've posted the panel family used in this exercise here. There's some additional funky formulas in it to drive the louvers using some API stuff, but you don't need to know about that to use the basic functionality]

Comments