First up, how do you learn to program in the first place?Īctually sitting down and learning to program can be a challenge. This is not written as a best-practices guide, and it is probably not the best way, but for those with the interest and aptitude but without the time to research, hopefully it will put you on the path towards producing useful programs in a short time frame. What you’ll find below is a beginners guide as to how I started writing python scripts in Revit. Luckily, industry research is a part of my role and I can justify the exertion. Michael Kilkelly over at Arch Smarter tells a similar story about the benefit of working in this way, saving an estimated 20 hours over a month with an initial 6 hour investment.Ĭoming in as an absolute beginner and trying to get a handle on how these things work, I found that while the information was out there, it was scatter-shot and assumed a certain amount of knowledge that an absolute beginner might give up before even starting. What would have been a week long process was turned into a single button push, the files ready by the time I got back from lunch.Īs well as saving time in the short term (spending two days to automate an otherwise week long process), this process can save time over the lifetime of your firm – if a client asks that the work be revisited, or if similar work needs to be undertaken for another client, the same code can be used to regenerate the work with only minor tweaking. After some brief mental algebra I was suddenly gripped by a deep curiosity of how to automate Revit tasks.Īfter a couple of days of trawling the internet and some infuriating trial and error I managed to write a python script that automatically generated the sheet generation and exporting process. The next Revit contract came in with over 800 family types. It wasn’t the most particularly engaging work, but it was difficult to justify the added effort of exploring alternate work-flows in order to only save a couple of hours of effort. With human error, and double checking, I ended up completing the work in just over a day, with a couple of hours cleaning up files the next morning. pdf files.įor each sheet, this generally took between 3-5 minutes (depending on how long the computer decided to hang for on each export). Each of these types had to be set up on it’s own named sheet with 6 orthographic views, and then exported out as both. The final output for this work ended up being 107 family types across 11 families. I’m going to open this document with a short story: Recently, a contract had us producing a set of Revit families for a client. Over the course of the year we’ll be featuring a series of articles by Christopher Welch on emerging and interesting trends in digital architecture, complementing and expanding on topics explored in talks given around New Zealand.

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