Transcript
AUTODESK® REVIT® ARCHITECTURE 2011 – TIP 056
Easily Creating Cables In Space Have you ever noticed that in some particular situation, Revit Architecture was able to snap in 3D (with Structure beams for example)? But this is sometimes kind of tricky to understand what to click or pick, and by the way, even though it would certainly be possible, this is not a designed “cable” feature and it’s not as flexible and precise as we would have expected it to create a system of cables.
One of the easiest and most flexible features certainly remains the “In-place” editing one, allowing to model whatever shape you’d like on top of any shape you’d need to. But, we will use an even more direct way to do that: Mass modeling to get an underlay where you’ll build be able to build on top.
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Let’s see how we would do with the boat building below to create a system of cables on its “nose”.
First step will be to create an in-place mass that you’ll call “My Cables”.
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Then, from the “Modify I Place Reference Lines”, then take the Reference line option. Don’t forget to check the “3D Snapping” option in the Options bar as shown below.
And build a line between the 2 extremities of your triangular boat mats. As you will notice, Revit lets you snap in 3D between both locations. That’s great. You have the underlay to start building a nice cable…
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You can then decide to have a kind of “curvy” cable… To do that, select the “Reference Point” option as shown below and click on the Reference Line you just created before (at the middle preferably).
Once your point created, and while still selected, click on the “Make Point Driving” option as shown below. It will allow you to modify the line that will behave as a curve driven by its center.
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Once this option set up, click back again on the point. You’ll notice that the point’s manipulator/control is following the line’s local coordinate system. We would like this to fit the global coordinate system, i.e. it should be parallel to a typical Level plan.
To switch the manipulator to the global coordinate system, just press your Space Key on your keyboard. The icon will then rotate in the space and switch to the main UCS as shown below.
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To now stretch our straight cable to make it look a little bit curvier, pick the blue Z-axis arrow and pull it down a little bit as shown below.
The cable skeleton should slightly look like that.
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You can now use that “Path” to make a Sweep extrusion. You will only need to create the associated profile for the cable. Let’s say a circle for example. We’ll use the existing reference point that we created previously. Taking the Circle model type option, draw a 5cm radius circle on the Reference Point’s Reference Plane as shown below.
Then, to create our cable, select your curvy reference line and the newly created circle, then terminate by clicking on the “Create Form” button.
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This is what you should get…
Proceed the same way on the opposite side or copy your cable by Symmetry from the Site Plan view. It seems to look pretty good…
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This is an easy and fast way to make some cables. Don’t forget to apply the right materials and to correctly set up the view visibility graphics settings (Mass category visibility turned on).
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