Import instance by geometry

Geometry
1

Hello to the community,

the last months I have been experimenting with dynamo and I am constantly trying new things. Lately I have been busy designing a workflow for automatically placing beams on faces.

One of the first steps in this workflow is to select a face and offset it by a given distance. This offset of faces had been working smoothly until the time I decided to upgrade my revit version to 2021 and in parallel get an upgrade for dynamo too. Currently the dynamo version I use is 2.5.

The problem I’ve been facing ever since is related with the standard dynamo node “Import Instance By Geometry”.

As you can see in the 1st image, in the dynamo environment the original face (blue) is offsetted by 100mm (grey). When however I export the offsetted surface to revit, it is imported in a location far away from the original face (2nd image).

I found out that the fix is easy. Just change the base level in the properties (image 3), and the offsetted surfaces will be placed exactly as requested in dynamo.

The question however is, why are the offsetted surfaces imported in revit in a wrong base level? Is there a permanent fix for this issue, that does not include manually changing the base level after each import?

Looking forward to your thoughts and experiences.

Regards!

Images
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2

I’m guessing it defaults to the lowest level since most elements are level based inside Revit.

I don’t think you need to recreate the face in Revit if you want to place beams though

3

Hi,

First of all, the Revit coordinate System and the Dynamo Coordinate System are different.

If you want to transfer a surface you have created in the Dynamo environment (regardless of reference) to the Revit environment, I recommend working with “Dots, Vectors and Coordinate planes”. This path will give you absolute truth.

A lot of things can change in Revit Version different, so “.Dyn” I recommend writing your files in Revit versions that you will use for a long time, so you can achieve more stable and consistent results.