by Dennis Collin
Dynamo scripting in Revit can be used to perform many different tasks. A common issue when modelling buildings is the problem of overlapping walls and floors. This can cause all kinds of problems for analysis tools for MEP purposes as well as room boundary determination for areas, interiors and facilities management tasks.
Fig 1. Overlapping elements in Revit makes for untidy detail sections and the cause of potential problems when running analysis routines!
These modelling problems are often caused by time constraints where people must get something ‘out of the door’ with an aim to fix it the following week, but work and times being what they are with the general pressure of project delivery, means that sometimes these modelling corrections get missed or forgotten about.
Fig 2. This simple script is very simple yet very effective. Selecting all the elements in the project and performing a join geometry function!
An easy solution to this is to create and save a simple script. This can be reused on any project which has clashing geometry. By loading this script and choosing the appropriate joining method, all floors and walls can be selected, and the join geometry function can be applied globally in moments! This simple script just uses a few out of the box nodes, Select Model Elements, All Elements of Category and Element.JoinGeometry.
The script in Figure 2 will either select all elements in a category or allow users to pick examples to join. There is also an Unjoin geometry node to mimic Revit’s out of the box (OOTB) function. With this example the Unjoin geometry node is frozen with a simple right click menu option.
Fig 2a. Nodes can be frozen or thawed to control which operations are performed.
Whilst there are ways of doing this task in Revit natively, its manual method and selecting visible items in a view means that some floor/wall junctions that need to be corrected may be missed.
Fig 3. Once run all the offending junctions have been joined according to material assembly function priority.
Whilst the script can apply joins globally, the Select Model Elements node can provide a more controlled method of selection, with a bespoke Dynamo package, even accessing Revit selection sets could be possible. In addition, there is nothing to prevent a user to used favoured classic methods of joining or unjoining geometry if required.
For more information on Dynamo and other script examples click here.