Description
What happens when some enthusiastic software developers team up with a few innovative mechanical designers? Henderson Engineers is an MEP design firm that’s been working on developing a modular DFMA (design for manufacture and assembly) air duct system for a while now, and has developed some clever Revit families and Dynamo scripts to help its designers model them. The firm joined forces with EvolveLAB, a building information modeling (BIM) consulting and software development company, to create a Revit add-in that focuses on the real-time generative design of these modular duct layouts. In this session, we’ll review how these companies used some unique properties of the Revit API to create a co-authoring system that allows a mechanical design to sketch out a main duct layout in Revit while the computer simultaneously and continually produces the most optimal layout using the DFMA kit of parts for that sketch—which is then finalized and converted into a fully connected Revit duct system.
Key Learnings
- Experience how generative design can be used for mechanical layouts within Revit.
- Learn about the real-time potentials of the Revit API, via Direct Context 3D.
- Learn the benefits of co-authoring in computational design.
- See how DfMA workflows can streamline the design and fabrication process.