Say,I have a curtain wall with different types of panels in revit and I would love to use fractal to get different design options (by changing parameter values) ?
How would I do that ?
Why isn’t there any support for revit? This would be a wonderful thing to do,Any head start on this?
Fractal only works with Dynamo Studio, which doesn’t have access to the Revit API. It’s best used earlier in the design process, but you can likely reverse eingineer the geometry to create various options that way.
You can also create design options of the walls/panels and run a randomized setting until you get one you like, make a new option, and run the graph again on the new option… repeat until you have the desired number of options within your parameters. Yes it’s not fully auto but it may be the best method to keep you from having to back track too much.
Fractal is a cloud service and as such, it has hosting, operational and maintenance costs, and thus for better or for worst, it’s limited to the “paid” Dynamo Studio version.
Fractal will take a native graph (no custom packages at this time), a list of inputs(most commonly sliders with “Is Input” checked), and ranges of values for each input(set prior to starting the execution). It will then generate a set of permutations inside of those ranges for all inputs, run the graph in parallel on multiple servers in the cloud, store all of the outputs (the final graphics + any named watch nodes) and collate them all in an easy to filter way.
It’s best described as a brute-force solution without any built-in intelligence, because fractal doesn’t know what distinguishes a good solution from a bad one. That’s entirely up to you - you have to build the logic that “grades” and evaluates all of the solutions yourself. Some of the outputs might even end up being “broken” due to the geometry getting stretched more than what is reasonable… Its core strength is that it provides an open, scalable playing field - what you end up using it for is entirely up to you.