Dangerous Curves Ahead: Building a Rectangular Window for a Curved Wall

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on Shut Up & do BIM's blog and has been republished here with permission. 


Well – this will be a classic work in progress kind of post – let’s see how far we can get today… the challenge is – build a rectangular window for a curved wall and build a curved window for a straight wall.

The latter is simple, so we start we the first…

First idea, forget about hosting it at all and just do a free standing window without host. But then again, let’s try a curved void in a normal windows family – this is the test rig:

revit-normal-windows-family-curved-void.png

Now lets try a OOTB Revit window family template – the idea is as follows:

OOTB-Revit-Window-Family-Template.png

Lets try to load that and see what happens – wow, works like advertised:

revit-window-family-template.png

Next step is to use this rig and start to build up the window step by step. First the frame – lets look at a simplistic sweep with a profile embedded. For the profile:

revit-window-frame-profile.png

Now, lets adapt the family so that we can make a nice easy sweep hosted on reference lines:

revit-reference-lines.png

Now with the profile hosted as a sweep:

revit-profile-hosted-as-a-sweep.png

Looks like this now:

revit-window-segments.png

Looking good – although the individual segments had to be created separately. Lets flex this thing to see if it holds tight:

revit-individual-segments.png

Yes – it does (until the next Revit revision I hope)

Next test – let’s flex the radius a bit:

revit-window-flex-radius.png

Wow – still all stick together – this means we have a stable rig to work with – lets break it down to the determining parts:

revit-stable-rig.png

It’s not as clean as I’d like it to be but we now have a workable rig to host further geometry on – after cleanup and some more flexing:

revit-host-geometry.png

Lets stress-test this:

revit-stress-test.png

Changed all the parameters in the family and it stuck together just like glue


Editor's Note: This post was originally published on Shut Up & do BIM's blog and has been republished here with permission. 

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