Hi everyone, I’v just use Dynamo for 1 day and I have some newbie questions, hope that any can enlighten for me. At the moment, I just have a basic Revit skill, should I stop learning Dynamo to strenthen my Revit skill or keep on learning Dynamo? What level should I have in Revit in order to start learning Dynamo? Any comment would be appreciated. Thanks.
hello @ktsthinhvt and welcome to the forum.
I am speaking on behalf of my experience and I think you’ll probably need some Revit knowledge in order to better understand how Dynamo works.
I started using Dynamo 2 years ago more or less, after using Revit for 7 years and now I can say “I understand something” about Dynamo
Try answering those questions:
REVIT related
- Do you know what a Family Type is?
- Do you know what a Family Instance?
- Do you know what Type and Instance parameters are?
- Do you know what a View element is?
- Do you know what a Level element is?
- Do you know what the project base point is?
- Do you know what a schedule is?
Dynamo related
- Do you know what a node is?
- Do you know what OOTB means?
- Do you know what are Object Types?
- Do you know what a number, a string, a boolean and a list are?
- Do you know what is an Array?
- Do you know what a package is?
- Do you know what == or != means?
If you’re answer to those question is YES so probably you’re ready to “level-up” with Dynamo!
I am not trying to scare you but because you said that you’re new both with Revit and Dynamo, probably you want to keep learning the Revit basics, than starting to create you’re first scripts in Dynamo. Otherwise you’ll find yourself struggling to understand each of the tools.
If I were you, I’ll focus on Revit first, via online training, books, blog posts, then Dynamo.
Anyway, this forum has plenty of examples and lots of professionals who will help you to solve the most common issues. The only thing to really understand a tool however, whatever it is, is to practice, and practice, and practice!
Hope this answer may help you, peace.
I’d go the other way with this. To learn Dynamo you only need to learn Dynamo. To learn Dynamo for Revit, or Dynamo for Civil 3D, or Dynamo for Alias, you ha w to have a strong background in the respective program. The biggest ‘miss’ I find overall though is that people aren’t familiar with the process, and that is really what they want to tackle. If you don’t know (and I mean really know) how to solve the problem you’re after manually then you shouldn’t be looking to automate or generate anything yet, but instead study the problem first.
+1
I’ve been working with Dynamo for the past 5 years, starting from scratch and with very little Revit knowledge and I still think it is more important to me improving my Dynamo and other languages coding than learning Revit. Unless your focus is to use Dynamo for Revit on your everyday they are different softwares with many other possibilities, not just Revit-focused.
Dynamo is also a great way to learn Revit. But you do need to know at least the basics (probably a little more) of how Revit works in order to really benefit from Dynamo.
My experience:
- Learned Revit first (3-4 years of Revit use) Achieved an intermediate/advanced level of knowledge.
- this Might tick the Autodesker’s off, but I still think Dynamo’s main use case is within Revit, so having an understanding of Revit essentials is very important, pretty much what @Ernesto_Pellegrino’s Revit bullets state . (This only applies if Revit is your use-case of course!)
- Stumbled upon Dynamo in 2013. I opened it and closed it immediately because it scared me. I had no clue what to do and all the nodes turned red and all sorts of other disasters. (Primer, dictionary and forum were not really how they are today though)
- Attended AU2014 and took pretty much all Dynamo classes. What really enlightened me was @Marcello_Sgambelluri’s classes Practically Dynamo and Dynamo for Dummies. These classes showed parameter manipulation in Revit. Once I saw that it all clicked.
- Began making simple graphs that manipulated Revit data in 2015 and started trying to help out on here and sharing workflows.
- 2015-2019 - A whole lot of other learning with more to come!
@All: Thank you for your time, your comments are really helpful to me. The reason I started to learn Dynamo is that I really want to try the parametric design. There would be some really cool ideas with parametric design, which can not ( or not easy to ) get with traditional design tool ( like autocad, sketchup, revit…) So I want to know if there is a chance to create cool stuff in Dynamo when my Revit skill is just in basic level. Anw, thank all of you for your comments, I think I have my own answer .
i stumbled on Zach Kron’s website Buildz when i was working at a company that did airport design and logistics.
It was then that i saw this picture and wanted to model the roof.
One thing led to another and thats how i learned.
One other thing that helps in parametrics is this page