Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Ferrari World Abu Dhabi in Revit

The other day I stumbled upon the Ferrari World Building by Benoy Architects.  Like so many other buildings which have been the basis for this blog, it captured my imagination because i wanted to know how you would generate and refine such a form in Revit's conceptual massing environment.


First thing i did was to start in sketchup so i could grab some key dimensions to start with:


The i recreated the circles and key curves in a conceptual mass family.  A 3 point curve sets up the pincers.  Points offset from a pair of constrained reference points along the bisector set up a curve for the broad side of the form.


A key element of success in generating a form like this is realizing that it is essentially a 60 degree swept profile with cutaways which is then mirrored around a circle.  If you make 1/6th of the form, you've pretty much got the whole thing.
So with these key curves done, i generated the voids to cut the skin:

I found some design information about how the skin profile was generated:


It would have been easier if i'd had a CAD file but approximating the curve wasn't that hard:



Then sweep and cutaway the excess so you only get the 60 degree segment:





Tweaking the parameters which control the broad curve, we can finesse the form a bit:




Cute.  But looking back at the picture, i can see that the center is a different material and there is a silver band along the broad edge.  This requires offsetting a second set of points from the ones which drive the broad curve.







In the end, i had to take the base skin and cut it up into 3 different parts for the 3 materials of the form.  These 3 then get nested into a single family which can still be massaged:


Then brought into the project environment, mirrored around and voila!




I could have gone much further with the parameters to control many more aspects of the form, but I figure this wasn't bad for a couple of hours work.  Fun stuff.

Link to the file:

Ferrari World.RVT





Monday, November 3, 2014

Twitter Ass(ault)

Do you follow @Autodesk?

Now would be a great time to start.  Later this week they are letting me pump a bunch of pictures through their twitterfeed for a day.

Should be good fun.... I guarantee.... @bimtroublemaker