I was asked by some high school students who I am mentoring on learning Revit how they could use Dynamo.
Currently they are learning Revit as part of a design competition and have to make a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house. This house could become the basis for a “catalog” home - one that could be built anywhere.
Typically the students make floor plans, elevations and a few wall sections as part of their submittal. I’ve already asked @john_pierson and @colin.mccrone for some ideas and thought I would turn here as well.
Keep in mind these are high school students who only started learning Revit a few weeks ago. I know one of the students did start going thru the Primer but was curious to see if anyone had any suggestions or examples they might be willing to share with the students.
Most of my DYNs are dealing with very specific things like overriding dimensions, or deleting linetypes, or backup files - stuff a high school students doesn’t care about right now.
The one student was thinking about using Dynamo to make Wright inspired furniture - but I wasn’t so sure about that.
They already have their floorplans set (for the most part).
Ideas?
Suggestions?
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If I remember correctly, Wright’s Usonian houses were usually based off of a grid system. You could use Dynamo to created different sized grids (and find the best fit for your plan) and perhaps use it as a guide to placing walls, furniture, etc.
Building off some of @erfajo’s ideas, you could find room volume or room area and the percentage of “usable” space. (Again, his Usonian houses were about utilizing the space of the house.) Window direction is a good idea too. It could be as simple as total window area per cardinal direction.
Using excel to swap out material types could be cool. And there’s always the good ol’ “select an element and get a section/elevation/3D view.” This would be nice for 3D wall sections and quick views of the building.
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Maybe show them how to use geometry - points make lines make surfaces make solids - to generate a larger/cooler object. Perhaps look at making a generative chair or table in dynamo, maybe using customizer to permit them to share furnishings between classmates, or fractal to allow for generating all possible configurations, and then let them pick their favorite.
Could also extrude basic shapes for site modeling.
never thought of that, with the grid system. I like that. Not sure if the students actually took it that far, but I like the concept.
recommendations for having Dynamo place this grid in the Revit project? I like the idea, just struggling on how to do it
It wouldn’t necessarily have to be Grid elements per say, it could just be detail lines. My thought was to use Dynamo to control the grid spacing so you could find a standardized grid size that might be close to the current plan. Then you could just manually move walls, furniture, doors/windows, and whatever else you want to “kinda sorta” get it close to aligning with the grid.
Of course you could give Dynamo more control to move things for you or try to calculate potential spacings, but that doesn’t seem necessary.
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Hi @Tom_Kunsman
Get them enthousistic and they dive into it themselves is what i found makes a good dynamo student.
So i was showing this:
Made some of them heads spin.
Whohooooo
Marcel
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On the same idea as @Marcel_Rijsmus - I substituted at a local college and one of the students asked how he could do a 3D relief map as a wall surface. Showed him how to read a bitmap, read the values of the pixels, map those to a dimension, and apply that dimension to a surface which was then used to generate a family… He was like “ugh” at first but as soon as we had 3d geometry for him to look at I saw the hamsters wake up and jump on the wheel.
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Hi
For me personally i wanted to make the shape of the roof of the mexico airport by Norman Foster and found http://buildz.blogspot.nl/
I studied it for two months while i was in between jobs and found my own enthousiasm.
The next time i applied for a job i was full of it couldn’t stop talking about possibilities and that landed, i had the job.
Marcel
PS. I had ideas of starting my own company which could show a revit model as an overlay just like the astronomic app Skyview does, it can show the nightsky with all the stars as an overlay and look at the real world while looking at the camera view of your Iphone. Touch a star in view and it gives me the name and all the info i wanted. Transformed this idea to Revit.
Seeing through the walls floors and so on and see the MEP objects inside the walls. Augmented reality.
I told my boss about it showed him the app and that helped too.
Get them enthusiastic and they dive into it themselves is what i found makes a good dynamo student
The flip side of this is wanting to learn but not having a clear objective. I run into this all the time personally. If I sit down on a Saturday and say “I’m going to learn Dynamo” I sit and stare at the screen. If I have a defined objective it is a lot easier to dive in and learn. Instead of “look at this cool thing”, assign them something - “Create the deck from Falling Water using only Dynamo”.
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@Chad_Clary
I agree. Good point
Its me trying not to think in problems but in sollutions
Failing though 
While that is very nice, and can show the power of Dynamo - I think in the end will only confuse them even more
Ok i get it @Tom_Kunsman
I have the same problem with my students.
But how to solve this? How do you make them “see”? i have the feeling that some of them will never learn.
Is it that some have the talent and some have just other talents?
Marcel
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Hello everybody,
I have seen this blog recently and, while reading your discussion, I was wondering if it could not be inspiring for students:
As I mentioned, they only started learning Revit like two weeks ago. I don’t want to over load them in the third week with something so complex. They are barely scratching the surface of Revit let alone getting into Dynamo. Giving them something so “over the top” I think will only confuse them.
I think something like placing walls based on a sketch (points / CAD link), looking at door orientation (as mentioned), or placing the grid (as mentioned) is a good start without going past beginner Revit work. I still remember when I was in school we had to take a CAD class and the professor spent lectures talking about all the cool stuff you can do without ever actually teaching how to do it, or more importantly, the basic steps required to actually get to the point where cool stuff was useful. We apparently were supposed to figure it all out in the labs… /eyeroll
Class content could vary some by program (design heavy vs practical), but simple stuff as mentioned above is a good start, or getting into some of the toys like rotations, mapping a bitmap, or using sliders to drive parameters can be helpful for actual studio projects. (and I just re-read and noticed high school students. it all still applies, just needs some revising for the audience.)
You could also just ask what things they need to do or want that are easily automated.
Sliders for parameter modification is a good one, if you can find something simple enough that still makes an impact. Even using Dynamo for visual organization with color overrides would be easy and practical.
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