Friday, August 05, 2011

Revit 2012 – dept of unfair – ellipses

Elliptical elements have always been rather awkward to create in Revit. For instance you can’t create an elliptical wall without first creating an elliptical mass & then performing the wall by face function.

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Whilst you could easily argue that ellipses are the scourge of architectural design, cause they are a pain in the arse to set out. Nether the less they are an important form to any designer or interior designer. Anyway, I was having some fun the other day looking at the best way to divide an ellipse into a number of equal segments. My old school CAD head kicked in, draw the ellipse, draw a series of circles on the perimeter on the ellipse then draw lines from the centroid of the ellipse to intersect with the ellipse of the circle. So I started in a new Revit project, followed the above procedure only to find I could not snap a line to the intersection of the ellipse & the circle??? Hmmm this seemed a bit odd….a bug may be? Anyway, I jumped over to the conceptual massing environment ( CDE in project as well as a family), did the same exercise & everything worked peachy here!

I don’t know what the project environment has against ellipses, but it needs to get learn from its sibling conceptual mass environment & get with the kids! One for the development team me thinks.

2 comments :

Unknown said...

Here is my take on it David:
What Revit Wants: Turn an ellipse into arcs for use in Revit

The CAD Setter Out said...

It's been good fun reading this post and the various reactions to it, but you all missed out one method - Let the contractor deal with it ;)

I put this post together on converting ellipses to regular arcs:
http://cadsetterout.com/autocad-tutorials/converting-ellipses-to-arcs/

Seriously though - Kudos to you guys for making the effort to make sure that you geometry is suitable for downstream manufacture.

Paul