nzdan

Sketch design & entourage

Sam’s conceptual sketch of the renovation project is shown below.

The video capture below shows how we insert this sketch into the Revit project, create additional levels, the use of phasing to add the dimension of time into our Revit project and begin using this as the basis to begin modeling the renovation.

Now let your creative side take over and improvise a design for yourself if you are following this as a tutorial.

Throughout the design process I tend to go off on my own tangent as a intellectual exercise and, well, just for fun.

I really like parts of the Wood Block Residence as posted on the fantastic site Arch Daily, so I have decided to do my own twist on this design beginning with a flat roof wrapping around the building to form the external walls.

The beach side facade of this renovation concept is open allowing the sand dunes to fill this space and showing the column structure beneath the floor and I have adjusted the layout of the stairs. I am considering applying battens to this sub floor area to create a lockable storage area and I would like to reconsider the intersection with the house and the floor heights.

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This model has been created very quickly using large panes of frameless curtain walls and generic walls, floors… as it is simply a design/form study at this stage. As this is a beach front property the way the renovation “responds” to the beach is very important as is the balance between capturing the stunning views and retaining privacy from both the beach and the adjacent properties.

To supplement the photos I took on site I have included a couple of screencaptures (using the great app. Jing) from google earth and google maps.

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We now need to develop the context of the site, the materiality, the foliage and begin more advanced rendering to better assess our design.

We will begin with the context, using in place massing to quickly model the basic shape of the neighboring buildings. As I do not have the exact location and dimensions I will use photos of the site to guess until I am able to obtain more accurate information.

The next context/site element we need to develop is the trees, Revit comes shipped with a range of RPC content by ArchVision. RPC stands for Rich Photorealistic Content and is based upon the technique of using images of object placed upon a object like a billboard with a alpha channel to show transparency and for shadow casting. It is a clever alternative to 3D geometry where a image if the object is always perpendicular to the camera giving the illusion of a 3D object.

As I am unfamiliar with the species of trees shipped with Revit I go through the process of rendering them all, selecting my preference, placing them in my scene and rendering to get the unedited image below.

Revit also ships with a RPC Volkswagen Beetle, and several people to populate your scene. The images below show loading these RPC families from the default library and the finished render.

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But what happens when you tire of this limited selection and would like to purchase and use more content from Archvision?

To do this you need to download and install the ACM (ArchVision content manager). Note: Please discuss with your BIM/IT manager prior to installing on a office network as there might already be a ACM on the system.

Click me for a tutorial link on purchasing and downloading RPC content.

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If you already own RPC content, you still need to download and install the ACM (ArchVision content manager) and then continue with the next step configuring the paths.

Open the ACM once you have completed installing it, open the Paths tab, add the appropriate location to your downloaded RPC’s and select Start Manual Scan. When you close the ACM you will notice a small ArchVision icon in the taskbar indicating the ACM is running in the background.

Now that you have the ACM installed and the paths configured you can access this RPC content to create new Revit families to use in your project.

(See the images below as a reference) “File -> New -> Family” to create a new family, select the “Metric RPC Family.rft” template and open, select the RPC and under the Modify Alex tab select “Types”, open the “Render Appearance” value, select the RPC you want and click “open”.

Save this new RPC family and load into your project and you are all done, easy.

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Still not happy with your RPC’s? (as they are ugly) then you can create your own custom RPC’s using the creator tools from ArchVision and use them in your project like any other RPC. This takes time to perfect but can be a great option to easily create a custom look to your Revit renders.

Click here for a step by step tutorial on how to use the free RPC creator tool

Note: I have not managed to get step 8 the Custom Icon creator to work, I am running Autodesk 2010 products on a 64bit o/s.

Click here for a step by step tutorial on how to use RPC creator pro

Click me for link to creation tools.

So I downloaded RPC creator and went through the steps, a couple of minor issues in Step 2 you need to use the default height of 70 (inches) as if you use like we do the equivalent in mm (1800) you end up with a giant even though Revit is set to mm. And step 8 just use the default icon as I used the RPC icon exporter and tried a bunch of different *dxf versions and applications with no luck.

I then created two RPC’s one in full color and one as a outline, you will notice when we render the scene the original photograph for the RPC can be problematic as it is likely that the lighting conditions do not match. I recommend using simple outline images for custom RPCs.

Finally I simply copied existing RPC’s in the scene and changed their parameters.

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Viola, I am in my render (and yes this is a average photo from a recent holiday…). Notice the shadow issues where the RPC/photograph has different lighting conditions (direction of shadows) to the render and I needed to be more careful in the creation of the image as I am currently floating above the surface.

I also need to work on the outline image abit adding more detail as it is not clear that I am carrying a surfboard. I will adjust the outline image and update the RPC from here on in I will simply use the outline version.