Automating Architecture

Over the weekend, I spent some time exploring the potential of AutoHotKey . This programme was not designed specifically for architects, but it has useful applications in the field nevertheless. Essentially, this is a programming language that lets users code their own keyboard shortcuts. The AHK file has to be open for it to work, but by appending a script file to the startup folder (accessable on windows by hitting Windows+R and entering "shall:startup" into the resulting pop-up window), you can open and run it in the background whenever your computer starts up. I've only spent a couple of hours playing around with it, but already, I've created a few cool shortcuts I'd like to share. Let's start with a super simple one: #q:: { Send "benjaminjamesrowley@gmail.com" } Let's go line by line: Declare a keyboard combination. I've chosen Windows (indicated by the #) + Q. The double colon indic...

In this post, we discussed the automatic creation and population of view sheets. We can also automate the export those sheets as PDFs - in my company, for instance, we do this every week to ensure that our clients, who do not use Revit itself, always have access to relatively up-to-date design information. To start, we'll collect all the sheets in our file and filter for the ones we want to export. There are two things to note here. Firstly, regardless of how many sheets we want to export, we need a list (if we only want one, we'll have a list containing a single item). Secondly, the list should not contain the sheet objects themselves but their IDs. doc = DocumentManager.Instance.CurrentDBDocument sheets = FilteredElementCollector(doc).OfClass(ViewSheet).ToElements() names_of_sheets_to_export = ["Lorem", "Ipsum"] sheets_to_export = [sheet.Id for sheet in sheets if sheet.Name in names_of_sheets_to_export] Once we have...

Let's say you want your non-coding coworkers to be able to control certain results of your scripts. There are several ways to do this, but by far the simplest is to create a shared Excel file. Your coworkers can input values into this file, which can then be read by your script at execution time. There are countless possible use-cases for this method, but for this example, we'll keep it simple and look at creating levels at certain elevations. Setting Up Excel Before we create any code, we need to set up our Excel file. Make sure to save it somewhere your coworkers can access. We'll create two columns, one called "LevelName" and the other "Elevation". We'll call our sheet "New Level Names". NOTE: Once the file is created, we'll want to add guards to make sure our script runs smoothly. We don't want people to be able to add non-integers to the Elevation column, for instance. For more information on protectin...

Schedules can be created and adjusted via the Revit API. In this example, we'll keep things simple and create a schedule that lists all the walls in our file and their lengths. To do this, we'll use ViewSchedule.CreateSchedule(), which takes three arguments: The document we want to add our sheet to. The Element ID of the category we want to analyse. The Element ID of the area scheme we want to use. We won't be looking at areas in this post, so we'll pass an invalid element ID to skip it. doc = DocumentManager.Instance.CurrentDBDocument wall_category_id = ElementId(BuiltInCategory.OST_Walls) TransactionManager.Instance.EnsureInTransaction(doc) new_schedule = ViewSchedule.CreateSchedule(doc, wall_category_id, ElementId(-1)) #ElementId(-1) is an invalid ID. It is used to skip the area scheme. TransactionManager.Instance.TransactionTaskDone() That should have created a new schedule. If we open that schedule, howeve...

View sheets can be created and managed automatically using the Revit API. Creating a Sheet To start, we'll keep things simple and discuss adding a sheet to a file. To do that, we'll use the ViewSheet.Create() method, which takes two arguments: The document we want to add our sheet to. The ID of the title block we want the view sheet to use. doc = DocumentManager.Instance.CurrentDBDocument #Get the ID of the TitleBlock we want to create titleblocks = Fec(doc).OfCategory(Bic.OST_TitleBlocks).WhereElementIsElementType() for titleblock in titleblocks: name = titleblock.get_Parameter(BuiltInParameter.SYMBOL_NAME_PARAM).AsString() if name == "lorem_ipsum": target_titleblock_id = titleblock.Id break #Create a ViewSheet of the established target type TransactionManager.Instance.EnsureInTransaction(doc) new_sheet = ViewSheet.Create(doc, target_titleblock_id) TransactionMana...