I am new to Dynamo and am looking for advice on whether it is a good software to use to simplify a Revit model prior to exporting it to Rhino for LBT environmental analysis?
I thought I’d be able to perform environmental studies in Dynamo but it seems like it is not the best tool for it. I am looking for a way in which I could simplify the Revit model without having to do it by hand so that when things change, I have a dynamo script ready to feed the model into, simplify it and reanalyse in Grasshopper.
are there any resources I could look into to better understand a workflow like that? Does that workflow make sense, or are there better ways of doing this?
Probably not too much that that couldn’t be done with native Revit tools.
The best strategy for export is setting up a view with coarse level of detail to reduce the number of faces exported. And hide any categories not needed for your end use.
As far as exporting out to Rhino, typically you would export to an intermediate file format such as dwg or sat. You could use the API to write out to a more digested file format for Rhino (and I’m not a big Rhino user, so - pardon). This would allow you to access the surface information in Revit at a low level and pull that into Rhino. Maybe saving a few bits and bytes. You see 3rd party rendering software doing this. But for that sort of task, I wouldn’t be using Dynamo. I’d jump to C# for a more robust plugin that will run faster and provide better API support between the two platforms.
That’s probably a lot of overhead for marginal gains in file size and speed over the existing Export > Import functionality.
This is the weakness in the system - if youre going to do the analysis in Rhino, then you’re going to have to re-export every time. I guess you could look into something like the Data Exchange tools for extracting just the goemetry you need, and thereby simplifying not just which geometry gets pushed out, but also which geometry gets updated. However even with that as soon as you touch the Rhino model everything is new again, so you’re stuck in an ‘edit > export > import > analyze’ workflow; if you make an step between edit and analyze you go back to the start each time you need an update.
If you want something more integrated, consider an alternative analysis tool (there’s a ton), or look into other connected means, including the Pollination toolset from the Ladybug team - it’ll seem expensive at first, but if you only need a few months I can’t imagine you’d be able to build a simplification tool or reduce tracing time to less than the billable hours you’ll spend reinventing the wheel.
Thanks for your answer! Yeah I’m definitely not advanced enough to be going into C# haha. Was just wondering whether there is a dynamo workflow that could make the iterative process and jumping around Rhine/Revit less painful. In my mind, that would be a good use for Dynamo. Thank you though!
Where I work we regularly run these types of studies. We generally use RhinoInsideRevit and Grasshopper/Python to bake in analysis objects such as room surfaces, window faces etc. which can be isolated algorithmically.
For obstructive geometry to solar etc. you can simply export to fbx, import to rhino and use as mesh. Dwg is not as good as it comes in as solids, blocks etc and is heavy/deeply nested sometimes - hard to reference.
For most studies that should be suitable. I tend not to involve Dynamo as it can struggle to deal with large geometry sets, especially if referencing potentially large/face heavy families. Fbx export is generally enough.
If you’re just doing direct solar, dynamo can technically achieve this using raycasting or vasa techniques:
I have a video here which shows a general roundtrip from revit > rhino > revit using rhino inside:
