Making Curved Mullions that Can Be Scheduled In Revit

Interesting question raised by Rene Pellicer Garcia on LinkedIn recently:
I found that I just couldn’t make real Revit curved mullions (of the right category, schedulable, measurable, etc). Best I could do was a geometry that looks very mullion-like, but can’t schedule it, measure it or quantify it…

It is one of those situations where there are many ways to accomplish the same task, and those methods could include:

  • Traditional family modelling
  • Adaptive components
  • Dynamo
  • Non-typical modelling (railings, structural framing etc)

I decided to give it a go with the Adaptive Component method. Here’s how I attacked the problem:

  1. Created an adaptive profile family
  2. Nested that into a 3 point Arc Mullion Adaptive family, and hosted it on the arc reference line
  3. In the Arc Mullion Adaptive, made the main mullion form from the profile and the arc
  4. Created a rig of Reference Lines to host the Arc Length Dimension
  5. Used some hosted points on the Arc as intersected references for the Arc Length Dimension
  6. Made a shared, instance, reporting parameter on the Arc Length Dimension

    https://wrw.is/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/family2Brig.png

  7. Loaded that family into the Mass form family
  8. Placed it with 3 point click placement
  9. Selected the Instance and used Repeat command to make it into a Repeater
  10. Did similar for horizontal mullions
  11. Noticed some places where it ‘broke’ – mostly where the Arc Length Dimension flips inside out or goes straight — considered making a ‘straight’ version of the family for these locations?
  12. Made a schedule, filtered by Type Mark, showing these Arc Lengths

    https://wrw.is/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/project.png

  13. For the purpose of Identification, made a quick Dynamo Script to auto-populate the Mark parameter:

https://wrw.is/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/dynamo2Bmark.png

I’m sure my solution is not perfect, but it is one way of attacking the problem. It could be finetuned to be more robust and provide a nice modelling output.

You can download my modified sample file here, containing the adaptive components.

LinkedIn discussion:
Creating schedulable curved mullions in Revit

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