Hi there, @GavinCrump I was following your tutorial regarding Al-Bahar Panels. I managed to create everything successfully and I’ve loaded it in the project. The only problem is that after running dynamo script, it places the panels reversed. I can’t understand what the problem is. I tried to follow exactly your workflow. I’d appreciate it if you could help me understand this issue.
Many thanks.
This is a problem I encounter occasionally as well and I haven’t personally found a consistent solution. The cause is that on some faces Revit decides the adaptive repeaters should face inward vs outward, usually on curved surfaces. As a result some components in my workflow get guided anti clockwise vs clockwise for their point order. My workaround is usually to manually flip the panels which point the wrong way.
If anyone else knows a consistent means of detecting and correcting this behavior feel free to post it here - would help me as well at times.
Trying to determine if points are clockwise or anticlockwise in respect to the referenced surface would probably be the key here. I spent a bit of time trying to find a consistent means of determining this but hit too many fringe cases depending on concave/convex conditions of surfaces.
I understand. Thanks for replying. Flipping them manually is working as you suggested
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I think it is that if the normal of them surface goes into the solid you need to reverse the direction, but I may have that backwards.
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Yes the difficulty I faced was that sometimes we weren’t dealing with solids, more often surfaces (canopies etc.) so containment checks weren’t available as a default approach. I recall thinking it should be possible and getting frustrated/giving up as I wasn’t getting logical results where I was expecting to from the API, some panels seemed to think they were facing the right way when they weren’t when queried etc.
I’ll get back to it if it becomes a major issue where I work most likely… if so I’ll return to this thread.
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Ah - yeah when dealing with ‘single face’ stuff things go a bit crazy. In those cases it depends on the designer’s intent (is the panel oriented to the ‘roof’ of the canopy or the ‘ceiling’?), and as Revit doesn’t really do a good job of indicating the front/back of a surface in the UI things get tough for the designer. Couple that with Dynamo needing the user to view the object in Dynamo (which many users don’t want to see) and you’re in a tough spot. That said I always recommend thinking of Dynamo scripts like this as a ‘users tool’ not as an add-in. The concept of placing panels is deployable, but the operation of the tool SHOULD be done by a designer in the Dynamo environment - they’ll think of new cool stuff for the next design at a minimum, and they’ll reduce the effort required by the original author too.
But short of that, the good news is that all families should orient consistently for a face, so i think you can reverse the face and re-execute to let element binding do it’s thing.
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