I want to create a sphere in Revit and apply a material.
I tried direct shape but I got a bunch of polygons rather than a nice sphere I could put a material on.
How would you do it?
Hello,
Do You want to do this strictily in Dynamo? I think the easiest way is to create an In Place Mass directly in the revit GUI as an extruded circle. The sphere is then editable as a chosen Family Type and materials can be assigned to it.
Hi @Alien i would try geometry.family.instance from spring
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100% in Dynamo 
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Ah! I forgot about that one! Thanks 
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I prefer working in the family document and creating the freeform directly with springs node:
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It works, but it’s really slow, even for 25 spheres.
I wonder if creating a template one then creating copies would make more sense?
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I want to apply a material though - one with an image.
That doesn’t work well on the faceted directshape.
I didn’t find the direct shape any faster either.
Do the UV mappings work well if you apply your material to a revolve created in the UI? if not, segmented is likely going to be a requirement; controlling the degree of segmentation is the hard part.
It’s a sphere so I’ve just got an image that’s twice the width than the height so it doesn’t need to tile.
And with a revolve that looks good on the ends? Hard to visualize what you’re after without a sample.
Another approach is to make an adaptive 1 point component, draw an arc in elevation to one side and an axis line in Z direction, select them and it should revolve around that line to make a sphere.
You can then read the radius from Dynamo as well as centre, and place the sphere in Revit as the family then set its radius as a parameter value.
Example family:
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Assuming your image is rectangular plane, when you wrap it around the sphere you are going to get some distorted data. Like putting a newspaper around a basketball. Lots of wrinkled and the paper (image) folds over itself as it follows the UV parameters of the ball (sphere).
This is one reason why segmentation can help as there are tools to remap the image to individual squares after unfolding.
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This project seemed like a good idea when I started. 
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I tried that but I can’t get rid of that line!
If I hide the line, the bauble hides.
I even tried making it its own subcategory (called, bob)
Also… can you do this via Dynamo only?
Hmmm… are your spheres actually spheres, or are they extruded glass with an open end at the top?
Not sure if this would resolve anything, but it might as it gives the shape at least one free edge.
I made these in Revit as per Gavin’s suggestion.
They’re 1 point adaptive components with an arc turned into a sphere.
Yeah - but if you don’t use an arc but the shape of the object, you might be able to get better results in terms of that line.
Something like this but with accuracy and consistency instead of what my clumsy fingers can produce:
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