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Joined: Fri, Jun 8, 2007
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using Revit Architecture 2009 Having some trouble with a family i'm trying to create. My office is trying to create a face based family for window mullions. While it's simple to accomplish to do with an in place family and just model the peices in place I wanted to take the error out of users hands and just have a parametric set. I've been working closely with another cad manager and he and i are about the same level of Revit experience but neither of us have any formal training. basically we would like to be able to tell this thing how many horizontal peices and vertical peices and the size of the actual glazing of the window to have it create these just on the exterior face of the windows glass. Any insight as to why this thing isn't working correctly or better ideas would be great
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Joined: Wed, May 9, 2007
141 Posts
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First off, I have created this same concept for a family. The issue boils down to joining geometry (for us). You see, I arrayed the vertical mullions (and could do the same for the horizontal), did some math, and made it so that our glass panel will always be 3' or 1'-6". The end result is that if we join geometry of the array elements, then issues start to occur, for example, if you increase the length of the window, and thus add an additional mullion or two, then these new mullions are not joined. But we defeated this by using masking regions to mask the lines we don't want to show (we found it is faster to copy and paste, than to use the lineworking tool). Anyway, if you describe more concisely what it is that you want, I'll try to help you through it.
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Joined: Fri, Jun 8, 2007
3 Posts No Rating |
yeah guess i kinda missed describing what was going wrong, oops. Basically no matter what paramaters i input after loading it in to a project the thing gets pretty haywire. it wont stretch or shrink correctly to the dimensions i'm trying to get it to adhere to. If i have a 5060xo window, counting the frame area the glazing dimensions i neeed the mullions to fill will only be 2'-3"w x 5'-7 1/2"h for each panel. I'm having trouble getting the mullions to stay centered on the window as well as adhering to the dimensions that i input for the height and width. i'm sure this is more about some parameter or dimension label i did incorrectly in the family itself. this is the most constrained family i've tried to make so i'm sure i'm either over thinking it or missing something simple.
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Joined: Wed, May 9, 2007
141 Posts
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try this: Conceptually, what you are trying to do is to space out evenly a given number of items across a certain distance. So looking at that distance, say "Length", it is composed of mullions, and glass, right? So if we have the smallest window we can (in Revit) we have 2 external mullions, and 2 internal mullions (unless your mullions are all the same size, in which case it would be 2 external and 1 internal). This is because in revit, an array can only be at smallest 2 members. Now take each mullion size (lets say 2" for external and 1" for internal) and you subtract them from Length to get the length left for the glass members (which dictates where the mullions will be located). So for this smallest case, we get =Length-2"-2"-1"-1" which can be turned into =Length-2*2"-NUMBER_MULLIONS*1". But we need to calculate the NUMBER_MULLIONS! This can be done by dividing the overal length by the # of panels... This family needs a user input value, either the number of panes/mullions, or the width of each panes. This is your preference. If you go for the number of panels, then subtract one from that to get number of mullions. So, PANEL_WIDTH = (Length-2*2"-NUMBER_MULLIONS*1" /NUMBER_PANELS using this value, you can get the distance between mullions... If this wasn't too painful, I'll explain further, if you need it, but I am beating Revit over the hypothetical head, as I've crashed yet again (#4 for me today!). If you take the fixed width approach, you use the same equation above, but in place of NUMBER_PANELS you have the FIXED_WIDTH parameter instead. Note: With the fixed width concept, you do have to do a little bit more, as your windows can only be lengths which are multiples of the panel width. Good luck, and don't pull out too much hair over this.
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