ARCH 653 BIM Projects

ARCH 653 Project 2

Overview

In project 1, I created parametric mass and facade of One World Trade Center (1WTC) by Revit. Now, the objective for project 2 is to improve the building model with a visual programming tool, Dynamo.

Procedures

There are two parts in the project to make the facade colorful with dynamo. The first part reads the color from an image and assign the color to the curtain panels. The second part changes the color by sun path. Figure 1 shows the original facade of the building.

Figure 1 Original facade

Figure 2 presents the dynamo program of the first part. At first, we have to select all the rectangular curtain panels by selecting one of them and using the Element.AllInstances node. Then we need to read the color from an image in figure 3. As there are 400 panels selected, we can set xSamples and ySamples as 20 so that there are 400 pixels chosen from the image which can be used to assign to the panels. In order to make the inputs format consistent of the Element.OverrideColorInView, we should use the Flatten node to remove the tree structure of the data. After running the dynamo grogram, we can see the façade become colorful in figure 4.

Figure 2 Dynamo program of the first part

Figure 3 Colorful image

Figure 4 Building facade after running the dynamo program

Figure 5 and 6 show the dynamo program in the second part. In the first place, I select all the triangular curtain panels and create normal of outermost surface of each panel. Further, I set the sun settings, and the location is at New York. Then we have to use the Vector.Dot to calculate the angle between the panel surface and the sun direction. As the input value of the color range is between 0 and 1, so I have to remap the calculating results of the vectors angle. After I run the dynamo program, the triangular panels will change color from red to blue according to the sun path. We can see the color change from figure 7 to figure 9. At 8 am, the facade in the second part is totally red. However, the right surface becomes purple at 11 am and the same surface becomes blue at 2 pm. We can see that the surface facing the sun is red and the surface back to the sun become purple to blue.