Tower fun repeater - nesting

So after a couple of posts on using repeater units to create quick towers for master planning, I thought I’d share another tip. Now, I agree none of tower stacks are doing to win design awards. However, the exercise here is to use Revits parametric functionality to quickly create a massing study for urban design / planning studies. So using the same principles I showed in the previous blog posts, I created a unit based on a generic model family.

All the parameters in this generic model are instance based parameters. The parameters included are…

Now you could go even further by nesting 2d families or calculating the floor area based on the parameters. What you could do here is endless. But in terms of making this useful for implementing on a project, ask what data do you actually need to calculate? Obviously number of units is useful, floor plate area, but what else? These are the things you should be considering when looking to embed useful data for urban planning. Whilst, in this example I have not created the parameters as shared parameters, in a proper project example I would, as I would ideally like to schedule the parameters as well as tag the units. So once you have your units working as you require as a generic model, next start a new adaptive generic model family. Load your generic model into the adaptive generic model family.The important thing here is to lock & align the nested generic model to the centre left/right , centre front/back reference planes. This will ensure the centre points of the units remain the same & it doesn’t shift around when you start to tweak the parameters.

Next I start to connect the parameters together. By selecting the generic model family, I can see the instance parameters that I created to start with in the generic model. When you do this, if you click the small button to the right of the parameter, this will open up the Associate Family parameter dialogue, where you can add a parameter of the same name & start to link the parameters from the generic model to the AC generic model.

After connected, its worth testing the parameters to see if everything flexes as you expect. Once everything is working, next load this into our repeater stack & place it on one of the divided points. Then use the repeater function, so that the nested AC repeats over the stack.

To make things flex at this level, again select the family & choose Associate Family Parameters using the same names as you did before. This allows us to provide maximum flexibility when working with the family in a project.Once done, load it into a project & start playing.