Hi, I just started learning Dynamo yesterday and through this forum I found quite a few useful tips.
I want to place my plumbing fixture families (for eg. WHB family I created with connectors for hot & cold water as well as drainage connector) in our model, but it needs to match the positions of plumbing fixtures in the Arch Model. For a start I am just placing the WHB-connector family at the moment instead of going through each floor searching where to put them and placing them manually.
My current workflow in Dynamo is I select the linked model, it searches for plumbing fixtures containing a certain name (“WHB” in this case), filter those out and gets the element location point, it then swops out that location with my family (see workflow attached).
It does place them, but not in the right orientation matching the arch model, also, I need to filter my search in such a way to pick up multiple WHB’s in the arch model, but named differently (in this case aslo pick up WHB that has “SAN-200” in name).
Is there a way to have a “tick” selection of families that I want to “swop” out with my families, and also make sure it matches the same orientation as those in the ARCH model? OR any suggestions on how to approach this differently?
It requires Python but you can get the orientation of the linked element based on the BasisX, BasisY, and BasisZ vectors. The vector you need depends on how the linked element is hosted.This is the first step in determining how to far and in which direction you need to rotate your own element.
No idea how Python works. Is there any way I can specify multiple families to look at in my filter?
Absolutely. You can either “hard code” the families or family types you’re interested in or you could use a filter that could look for a specific parameter value or even just name.
You also don’t have to do everything in Python. You could get all the linked instances you need with nodes first and then use Python just to find the facing orientation. There are also a few nodes that attempt to find the facing orientation already but they depend on a how the family was created. They would be worth a try first.
Hi Nick,
Is there a way to find the orientation of a wall hosted family for this process? I tried to find the orientation of unhosted family and it worked fine. But when it comes to hosted, It returns different values.
Thanks in advance!
That’s the point I was trying to make. Depending on the orientation the family was built (in the family editor) and its placement (in the project), the normal axis could be BasisX, Y, or Z. You more or less have to know which one the family uses beforehand or take extra steps to compare each axis to the global coordinate system to determine direction.
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Haven’t thought of considering its position inside the family editor. Let me try it. I had very little luck earlier.
