Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Living Wall Example in Revit

I occasionally receive Revit-related questions from professors who use my books in academia. Yesterday I received one concerning performance; a small model around 30 MB. I figured right away it would have something to do with a complex family, and I was right, sorta. The main issue was using Realistic mode in Revit, more on that in a moment, and the number of RPC shrubs placed in the project.

Turns out, the RPC content was being used to create a living wall in an interesting way. This post will show how that was done and talk about a "cure" for realistic mode.


Read on to learn more...

First of all, the cure... I recommend never using Realistic mode in Revit. Rather, use Enscape:) System performance just tanks whenever a Revit view is set to realistic. Enscape can remain open, and connect to Revit while you work (just remember to hit the "Pause" button if you are going to make several big changes). All the example images in this post are from Enscape.

The living wall family being used by the student is from RevitCity and called; Green_Wall_-_Living_Plant_Wall_19151.rfa. Some people get a little excited about using content from this site, but most people don't have time to recreate some of the complex content available here. I got all the vehicles for our Superior Street project there, see this post: Reflect on Enscape + Materials. But, never the less, use at your own risk.

Because planting families can be scaled, someone placed an RPC shrub family into a wall hosted family, scaled it down and then copied it all over the place:) Turning realistic mode on, in the project or family editor, is a really bad idea in this case as it takes forever to generate the view and is very difficult to navigate the scene.

I took said family and loaded it into my Law Office model, from Interior Design Using Autodesk Revit 2020. The Enscape-generated results are shown in the images below (note that Enscape replaced the RPC in Revit with its own high quality model). I am sure using similar techniques with some of the new high quality content coming out, one could get even better results!

Now I feel the urge to go water the plant sitting next to my desk:)

How how you achieved a living wall representation in your work? Please share in the comment section below.













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I also write blog posts for Enscape - a new paradigm in rendering, animation and VR for AEC.