Our first project is to design and build a simple rolling wall. The design is largely fixed. It makes use of a hollow core door and a furniture dolly and adds a few pieces of plywood and wood trim. However, some details need to be worked out.
The designer should model the furniture as carefully as possible in a computer program, and prototype with physical construction as needed to understand the joints and the assembly.
The exercise introduces several fundamental concepts.
First, Revit has four editors built into it:
This project mostly uses the family editor.
Second, Revit makes use of a concept from computer science called "object-orientation". The notion derives also from linguistics and fundamental concepts of knowledge (a field of philosophy that used to be known as "architectonics"). Concepts can be organized into hierarchies of high level abstract concepts and lower level, more concrete concepts. The high level ones are called classes, while the low level ones are called instances. For example, a door is a relatively high level concept in that there are many kinds of doors: hinged doors, bifold doors, revolving doors, garage doors, and so on. A specific door, such as the front door to my house, is called an instance. All objects of the same class have some attributes in common; all doors can be opened or closed. All "subclasses" have additional attributes in common, such as all hinged doors swing to open, and may be left-handed or right-handed.
In Revit, the classes of objects are called "families". The subclasses are called "types" and the instances are called "instances".
Some of the families in Revit are "built-in" and can be edited in the project editor. These are mostly fundamental architectural concepts, such as walls, roofs, floors, and so on. Editing is limited to defining a handful of materials, dimensions and other parameters. Geometry editing is somewhat limited. Other families are stored as separate files, and are "component families". Component families may be edited using the family editor to have user-defined geometry.
A type is a group of family elements that have some parameters in common but have some parameters that vary from one type to another.
Families may be nested; this means that one family may include another family.
These are difficult concepts for a neophyte to grasp. Don't worry about it. As you use Revit it will become understandable. It is not Autodesk's fault that the concepts are hard to understand. They have deep roots in philosophy, lunguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence.
I have recorded steps in Revit for modeling the rolling wall (these steps will be revised as I figure out better ways to do it.) i apoligze for the bad sound. I will get a better microphone for future videos.
The idea in making the rolling wall is to make each piece and assemble them: the plywood base, the wheels, the trim, and the door. Is one takes care to make each piece using principles of parametric modeling, they are highly reusable as the dimensions may be adjusted for a different application. The steps for building a simple model of the rolling wall follow:
Step 1 Model a sheet of plywood
We will do these steps in a lab on Monday.
Here are some notes about getting oriented to Revit.