Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Eden project : API application of BIM

- Introduction

For my Eden project, I wanted to improve my parametric family in accordance with project 1.

There are my goals as follows:

Develop my own parametric model such as material thickness and color

Control the uniform color of all the domes or I can make random color to each panel for the design purpose
Weather data in excel will be applied to Microsoft Visual C# program and it will reflect the thickness of my dome model.


- Process


To complete my task, I first set thickness of material from family parameters. Below are my family parameters that I used for my project 2.


Figure1. Family parameters


In order to get the element ID, I clicked the one mass from the project, and the entire element ID of was selected from the mass.


Figure2. Element ID of selection


In order to use plug-in API into the revit, it is mandatory to build the solution in C# program and load the dl l file to revit add-in before run the add-in.


After that, I wrote down C# language and added my weather data sheet to coding. It was required to understand the logic of process with regards to C# language before starting to make coding. If statements were used to determine different thickness of the dome. In the excel data, there are five weather’s data such as rain, snow, thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes. Below is my API coding that I used for the IF statements.


Figure3. IF statements used for coding


Finally, I changed my coding part in material thickness and color. There were significant differences among random thickness, color and uniform thickness and color. I combined all the possible cases such as random color and thickness, random color and uniform thickness, uniform color and random thickness, uniform color and thickness. All the results showed substantially different in aesthetic view.


- Results


The screen shot below shows all of my results after I plug-in API into the revit.



Figure4. Random color & thickness

Figure5. Random color& uniform thickness


Figure6. Uniform color & random thickness


Figure7. Uniform color & random thickness (blue)


Figure8. Uniform color & random thickness (green)


Figure9. Uniform color & random thickness (red)