Exporting apertures with frame and louver part

Revit Plugin
1

Hi all,

Do you think is there a way to bring frame/louver part of the below aperture through Revit plug-in?

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There is no option for selecting glass and frames materials through room manager. This may be why the aperture came as a single piece.

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On the other hand, I m able to edit materials and finishes section for the object. However, when I assign a different material for frame/louvre, it doesnt help at all.

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Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Levent

1 Like
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This is a good question for @ksobon! I know that if you can apply different materials to different parts then they will be added to the dropdown, and you can filter them but I’m not sure how to do that.

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Hi all,

Just an update on the same topic. Apparently, when we are not able to separate frame parts of the aperture in Revit plug-in, the entire window area could differ by 10-15% depending on the actual frame factor. As a result, this would make an impact on the results for daylight and energy simulations.

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I know that some software has automated creating window frames with given width or putting frame factor as an input before running simulation.

Thanks,
Levent

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Hi @hlkocalioglu - thank you for posting it here. Let’s see what @ksobon thinks about this. If we can’t resolve the case in Revit, we should be able to provide a command in Rhino to offset the apertures inwards to account for the frame’s thickness.

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@mostapha @hlkocalioglu Here’s a video I made that explains how the materials work and what are your other options to exclude the frames if you don’t have control over the materials or they are instance parameters which we ignore.

https://watch.screencastify.com/v/Mzmt3SowI66dajwTC3vG

2 Likes
7

Hi @ksobon - The video is great. Is there a reference that you can direct me to that shows how to apply different materials to the type? Is it possible to do that for the Single WIndow that you showed in the model? Similar to editing the visibility?

I would think that is a better solution than using visibility. One can edit the family type, add the materials, and that should solve the problem of using it with Pollination while keeping the visualization as expected.

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@ksobon - I thought about what you mentioned about instances and not knowing which material layer(s) to pick for the menu but then you quickly picked the right material when you saw the name in the model. What if we add an additional filtering based on the name that the user can provide? That’s an easy one to identify and doesn’t need to change the visibility or the materials. For instance, in the case of the sample model, I know I want the material that is named Glass.

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And I have seen several models that use Glass_visible and Glass_spandrel for instance. In that case, I want to pick the materials that include glass and ignore the ones that include spandrel. What if we add these as two columns so that the user can input these values as a comma-separated list? They can be two additional columns.

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Then if include or exclude are provided you can do something like this. Otherwise, we parse everything that is selected.

for material in materials:
   for keyword in include:
      if keyword not in material:
           continue
      for keyword in exclude:
          if keyword in material:
              continue
   # process this material for an aperture
   ...

I think this approach is a better approach because:

  1. It is easy to see the list of materials and find the correct one.
  2. It doesn’t need advanced Revit knowledge to edit stuff in Revit.
  3. More importantly, you can use the Revit model as is without making a change in the model.
9

@mostapha I am not sure I understand what you are asking here. Am I guessing right that you want to see ALL of the materials listed under each Window Type regardless if they have a material assigned to it or not? The reason I filter out materials that don’t have anything assigned is because that results in geometry not having any material on it. There is nothing for me to check when we parse the geometry. So just having the parameter present doesn’t really do anything unless that parameter has a value assigned because then that value propagates down to geometry and geometry then has a material assigned to it that I can extract and compare to whether it’s considered an aperture or not.

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@ksobon, what I’m suggesting is simpler than that. I’m suggesting relying on the user to type in the keywords. Here is a short video that should clarify what I have in mind.

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@mostapha OK, but does this new interface mean that we get rid of the current one? Do we remove checkboxes, and figure out what is aperture or not via this new keyword based system? If we keep both, what if they contradict each other?

Optionally why not just include all of the instance parameters as well? I mean, it mixes type and instance properties, but I can get a list of all instance materials as well and put that into the list as well. Thoughts?

12

In my mind, we only enable them for cases where there are no checkboxes. If there are checkboxes then we don’t need the keywords.

This sounds like a cleaner solution than the keywords but I was worried that it can be a very long list from all the instances and it might take a long time to calculate. You are in a better position to make the call. Any solution that doesn’t need advanced knowledge of Revit, works without the need to edit the Revit model itself and is easy to learn for the users works for me.

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Now you have more control on what to be included in the apertures using type or instance material parameters:

1 Like