*IMPORTANT
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Creating sections for documentation is an essential yet painful part of the modelling process, this post will walk you through the steps of creating individual aligned sections for walls in Dynamo.
When attempting new problems, I find that it is always easier to reverse engineer solutions in Dynamo. Since the end goal is to create sections, let us start by first examining nodes that create Section Views for us, i.e. SectionView.ByBoundingBox and SectionView.ByCoordinateSystemMinPointMaxPoint nodes.
SectionView.ByBoundingBox
It may be tempting to choose the SectionView.ByBoundingBox method due to its simplicity, but unfortunately it didn’t achieve what we wanted due to the lack of control inputs (See below). Hence, let’s try examine the SectionView.ByCoordinateSystemMinPointMaxPoint method instead.
SectionView.ByCoordinateSystemMinPointMaxPoint
The node takes in three inputs, i.e. the Coordinate system, the Minimum point and the Maximum point of a Section view. Let’s walk through each input.
Coordinate system input
The coordinate system input grants users the ease to define a separate coordinate system for each instance, which would be extremely useful for us to create sections that are individually aligned to each wall. The nodes below creates a new coordinate system on the center of each wall, we can imagine having one coordinate system attached to the center of each wall instance. Two examples have been illustrated on the plan and 3-D views below.
Minimum & Maximum Points input
With the coordinate system set, getting your minimum and maximum points should be a breeze. Let’s begin by trying to understand what does the minimum and maximum points mean.
If we select any Section view in Revit, we can see the glowing blue outline of a section view’s extents in both Plan and Section views as illustrated below. On the same image, the Minimum and Maximum points refers to the corners marked on the extents of both Plan and Section views.
With that understanding, some simple data manipulation using each wall’s length L, and height H, will help us get our minimum and maximum points. I have preset section offsets to be 500 to ensure the wall’s face show up.
And that’s it! You can automate placement of section views for your own specific application now!
MEP opening sample application
We could also add upstream rules for creation of section views to make the Dynamo graph more meaningful. A sample application could be creating sections for walls with MEP services, to let structural Engineers inspect penetration sizes. Check out the video for creating sections on walls with Ducts!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and will be of some use to you! Dynamo file can be download here! Do drop a comment if there’s any queries, I’ll be happy to help 🙂
Thanks Han. This is exactly what I was working on when I came across this post. It helped me a lot to understand the local coordinate system. One question – I’d like to show the local coordinate system created as you do in your illustration. How is that done?
Thanks for your kind words Joe, I’m happy I helped.
You can actually use both
Line.ByStartPointDirectionLengthandGeometryColornodes to create those illustrations on your Dynamo canvas!Sorry to disappoint, but those you see on the post was drawn on top of images manually to illustrate better haha.
Hope this helps!
Han
Actually I found out the hard way- Z axis for new CS system must be in opposite direction of object you are trying to view.
Hey Han,
First of all thanks a lot for your publication. It helped me out a lot so far.
I’ve expanded it slightly for my own usecase, but I was wondering if I could simplify the output in a way.
Right now we often have walls which are collinear to each other. Instead of generating a view for each wall I’d love it if the script could make it 1 extended view of both (or more) walls.
I can’t seem to set up a check for collinearity to extend my views…
Thoughts?
Hey Jonathan,
if those walls are enclosed within the same room. You could create the sectional views using the boundary lines of the room.
Hope this helps!
Han
Great work!