A while ago I made a post about randomizing the Family Types of a Curtain Wall’s panels.

The technique is actually usable on any kind of families in Revit.

Last week I made a video about a node I created that randomizes the curtain Grid of the Curtain wall. It is a demonstration video, as some call it a “show off” video. But I’m sharing the node for a small fee (you can find it on the downloads page). Here's the video, showing how you can use this node:

You've probably seen the short video showing how to use it with Dynamo Player:

Actually there is another video where I show how to use the Dynamo player in Revit 2018.2:

I can also make a video showing how to achieve the same result without having to write code if there’s enough interest in the comments.

Achieving the result without code is possible, thanks to some amazing packages available for Dynamo. It could even be more versatile, though probably slightly slower. That said, the node (based on a Python script) could also be easily adjusted for slightly different purposes like, for example, if you want to have all the horizontal gridlines fixed and only the vertical to be randomized. To achieve the result I’m using the AddGridLine method from the Revit API which requires 3 inputs: boolean value to determine is at a horizontal or a vertical gridline(isUGridLine); XYZ for the position of the line and another boolean to determine if it’s going to be a single segment or an entire isoline (oneSegmentOnly). I’m randomizing a certain amount of points on a surface, extruded from the wall’s location line with the wall’s height. That means that if the wall profile’s edited or the wall’s location line is on a different level from the wall, all the points that are not on the surfaces are going to be ignored. Of course if we need to use it on such walls there are other ways to place the points. I’m also randomizing the boolean values that go into isUGridLine, because this was the result I was after. As I mentioned here probably you would need a randomization only for the horizontal or only for the vertical panels. This is the core logic of the node, there are other minor functionalities of course, but this is the most essential. Tell me in the comments if you’re interested in a video showing how to achieve the result with Nodes. (I’m not promising it’s happening anytime soon though, I have a lot of work to do)

Randomization is one of the topics I find interesting for Dynamo, albeit probably not the thing you’re required to do every single day.

I am thinking of what should I post next. Should it be something interesting like the facade posts and topography modelling, or should be something more practical like - automation of creating drawings and sheets and placing dimensions? What do you think?