Converting a surface to a conceptual mass in Revit (using Dynamo)

Revit
1

Hi everyone,
I’m trying to create a conceptual mass from a surface.

I’ve got the surface (built from a Dynamo script from an excel sheet with coordinates) of beam and I would like to know its volume, so I think I need a conceptual mass to find it…

I would like to know if there is a method to do it directly! Thank you

2

By the very definition, a surface does not have any volume… do you mean that you have a solid? We may need to see what you have in front of you to help. Post an export of your workspace (zoom in so you can see just one or two nodes and hit the camera icon in the top right).

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3

Firstly tank you for your answer!
The problem is that I’ve some difficulties to run the code because of the quantity of points.
So currently I don’t have the project finished with the surface.

I started with a point cloud with thousands of points and I created an excel file.
After it, I imported on Dynamo creating points by the excel file.
Now I’m trying to run it to visualise this first step, but it is too much for my computer…
So I can show you the screen of the code, but the excel file is not the correct one, because if I put the right one it’ll crush.
So don’t look at the yellow advices.

From this I need to create a conceptual
mass to calculate the volume…

image
image1440×640 77 KB

4

Some things to try:

  1. Switch from excel to a .csv; less memory to utilize that as it doesn’t need an external app, and it can transpose the data to remove the second line entirely.
  2. with the .csv data use a List.TakeEveryNthItem to reduce the number of points you make. This will reduce accuracy but otherwise your workflow won’t work at all. Note you’ll want to work with the input @L2 here.
  3. From the reduced csv use a code block of Point.ByCoordinates(data[0],data[1],data[2]); to create the points. This will again reduce the number of nodes and thereby reduce the RAM needed.

From there you can try and make a reference point, but that may also be a bit much.

Overall you’d be better off converting the point cloud into a mesh using something like recap or meshmixer rather than Dynamo. There are however several great examples of using point clouds in Dynamo on the forum, check those out to see how other users are utilizing the tool.

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5

CloudCompare is a great (and free) tool for this

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