Computation Height

If you are placing rooms in your Revit model and you have a room that seems to be enclosed on all 4 sides and yet when you go to place a Room, Revit informs you that it is not enclosed. It may be because of the Levels ‘Computation Height’.

Revit identifies the enclosed perimeter of a room at a distance above the level, set by a parameter called the Computation Height. By default the computation height for all levels is set to 0, and usually it works except if you have the base of the walls set above the level, like in the case of a room being set on a plinth or a mezzanine.

If you need to adjust the Computation Height, you have to go to an elevation or section view, select the base level line and look at the Properties palette, under Dimensions, and enter a value in the Computation Height parameter that will raise it up to a level above the base of the walls.

You room now will be enclosed.

If you have sloping walls in your model, be aware that the Areas and Volumes calculated will alter depending on the computation height set.

Rio Olympics Kinetic Sculpture in Revit and Dynamo

In the spirit of the Olympics!!!

I was intrigued by the Kinetic Sculpture that is behind the flame at the Rio Olympics. So I decided to see if I could model it in Revit and get Dynamo to animate it!!!

The model is fairly simple once you get your head around that it is just one "Paddle Element" arrayed around a circle and then each one is rotated slightly to provide the 3D helix like pattern.

The Paddle is an adaptive component that is using 2 hosted points providing rotation in 2 directions.

The Dynamo script provides the input to setup all of the paddles (this could have been done manually, but why bother), and then an integer slider allows the animation of the Paddles.

Finished product below.

Select by ID

Revit is not just a modelling tool it is a vast database of information, and every piece of modeled information can be identified uniquely by its ID number.

To be able to identify every element by its individual ID number is extremely useful when you run into error messages like this……..

Or when you run a warning report on your model and you need to try clear out the warnings, usually the only way to determine what the warning is related to is through its ID number.

If you need to find in your model elements only identified by their ID number, then if you go to the Manage Ribbon, and select the ‘Select by ID’ tool.

All you need to do now is to type in the ID number (or numbers, use a semicolon between) and Revit will scan the model and select the elements.