There are a number of examples of using Rooms to Mass workflow with Dynamo. Are there any examples of Area Plans to Colored Mass forms?
Are there any examples of making area plans? Seems I can only make drafting views or floor plan views, neither of which is appropriate for automating the documentation of room/unit areas.
Looked a little further into this. I can generate Drafting Views by name but I’m concerned as it creates a duplicate view every time the graph runs.
Then I tried to use some Clockwork nodes to place the Area element boundaries as Detail families onto Detail Views, but this didn’t turn out particularly well. http://dynamobim.org/forums/topic/is-it-possible/
Here is the file I managed to create area plans with. It is very messy and requires the user to have at least one area plan existing in the project. I used springnodes’ Collector.CurrentSelection to get this plan.
All dependencies include clockwork, archilab_grimshaw and springnodes.
Hey John this is great, thank you for providing the quick fix. Over the weekend, Dimitar added a node to his latest version of Spring Nodes called “AreaPlan.ByLevelName.” This node has no Dynamo external library dependencies (it’s a Python script) and is able to recognize if an Area Plan View already exists which avoids the duplication issue.
To clarify my intent here, I am trying to create a key plan per Area Plan view per unique residential unit, which I have identified as an Area element (rather than a Room element, because a unit contains multiple rooms). Using the node above, I was able to grab all of my Area elements, extract their names and host Level elements, and then batch generate all of the desired Area Plan Views.
You’ll notice two Wombat custom nodes here. These are not necessary to the process but they helped me to capture two generic sub-routines that are part of this graph. The first, “Wombat.Area.Name,” is some simple string parsing to deal with the fact that the Element name of an Area element actually includes the Number parameter in the string, which is a bit strange.
The second is “Wombat.Level.Element.ByName” which is a generic way to select Revit Level elements by specifying their names (it’s not particularly smart, it’s just performing a Boolean mask on string matches - perhaps there is a more direct way to select an element’s host Level).
So now that I can successfully generate all of my unit key plans using the method above, the next thing I’m interested in automating the appropriate Color Scheme within my View Template. As it stands, I am using a Color Scheme that applies colors based on Area (in this case representing a unit) Name. Since there is one key plan per unique unit, I identify the unit in question in each plan and give it a highlight color, while coloring all other units on the level a more modest color. The issue here is that I have to manually select the highlight Color in the Scheme Definition per view, which is a bit time consuming. Instead of coloring by a value (a specified Area name), I’d much rather be able to color by rule (for example, if the Area name matches the view name, use the highlight color, otherwise/else use the modest background color. My initial guess is that this will require a more robust API solution, assuming everything I require is exposed.
I’d certainly be interested in hearing others’ thoughts on this, particularly if there are others out there trying to tackle similar documentation issues. I’m attaching the 2 Wombat nodes as *.dyf files for anyone who’s interested.
Thanks!
2 Likes
hello John,
Can i please have the createareaplan script loaded, its not opening
not too sure what am i doing wrong
Cheers
S
Hi Brian,
Your post about area plans looks great, I’m just stuck to make some script alike for Dutch regulations.
Only the images and script are not visible anymore. Do you want to place them again?
Greets