7 Ways of Creating Curved and Round Shapes in Revit Tutorial

what's going on guys balkan architect here and as the name says i'm an architect now as architects uh we tend to get attracted to those unusual uh building shapes and especially when it comes to curved buildings curved shapes i think all architects like that maybe it's because none of the investors are willing to actually build something like that and none of the clients have the money for something like that maybe that's why that is so attractive for architects to design so everybody loves zaha hadid designs frank gary designs uh something like uh called drava and so on so uh naturally a lot of people are asking me because they create private tutorials well how do you create these curved complicated shapes in rabbit what is the approach what would be the best way of creating shapes like this so in today's video i decided to outline these seven approaches to creating curved uh shapes curved structures in revit and the first four are going to concentrate on the project environment showing you how to use some of the basic tools in the project environment like walls roofs floors and so on to create these complicated curved shapes and then later on i'm going to be showing you another three approaches inside of the masking environment which allows you much more versatility and you can create something much much crazier which is of course what we all love now if you're interested more and tooler in learning something like conceptual design conceptual massing complicated uh advanced modeling in revit i have a complete eight hour course on that topic it's available on my website that's going to be the first link just below the video so if you're interested in something like that check that course out and of course if you're interested in all of my revit project files for each of these tutorials all of my project files are uploaded on my patreon page so uh if you join there you can get access to all of those so that's going to be the second link just below the video okay so without any further ado let's get straight into rabbit and here we are in revit so let's immediately get started by going here to models then going to new and for this particular demonstration i'm going to use my own balkan architect template it includes all of the families that i usually use and if you're interested in getting either of my templates you can find them on my website balkan architect.com that's going to be the third link in the description if you're interested in these templates so anyways let's open this one up and then i'm as soon as revit opens up we're going to be covering first how to use the regular project tools and actually we're going to be showing i'm going to be showing you the wall tool and also the roof tool and how can you use these two tools in conjunction with with each other in order to create some really interesting shapes so let's start off first with walls so i'm just going to open up the wall command and then for walls for making curved walls you only have a few options you have the start and radius arc you have the uh center and arc and then also you have this tangent and arc and uh finally we have the ellipse tool and the uh partial ellipse which is well kind of half of the ellipse so these are the tools that you can use i prefer usually using arcs as they're in my experience at least at the most intuitive as you can see when the other wall highlights that means that this is all uh this is all tangent so the whole shape is should look a little bit nicer so there we go and then we can kind of finish it off can we find something that works for both there we go uh okay or it doesn't work but anyways this is how you can use the uh wall tool in order to in order to just create some curved walls now this isn't really anything special it's fairly simple and straightforward maybe the ellipse tool gives you a little more uh interesting behavior i guess you can call it and then when you create your ellipse you can make it even more partial by using the split element tool and then splitting it at a certain point and then you can just get rid of one segment and then you can play around with this ellipse maybe connect it to a different curve the wall so if i go here to this wall and i can perhaps continue off something like this but here it's not going to give you the tangent options so you just have to be kind of careful and try to eyeball it really nice so there we go that's uh those are just some of the basic tools for creating walls that look like this but then we have the roof tool which allows us to do something a little bit special with these curved walls so before we go to that roof tool let me just explain that for walls if you have a straight wall just like this you actually have the ability to edit the profile and then when you go there into edit profile so if i just go back so it's over here when you select the wall it's here on the modify tab we have the edit profile and then you can simply use perhaps the spline tool and then you can really create some interesting shapes for your walls so let's try to snap it here at the edge there we go perfect and then if i just delete these two lines this is going to look like a really cool wall so you do have that ability but unfortunately whenever you create a curved wall such as one of these when you select it as you can see that's grayed out so we don't really have that option so what you can do is as i said use it in conjunction with the roof tool and then you can create an interesting top for this wall so let me show you how to do that for that we have to move to one of the elevations so let's go here into uh first let's go into level one and let's place a reference plane here on which we're going to be hosting our roof and then let's go here to reference planes and then let's place one like this and you have to name it that's really important so you can select the reference plane and then you can name it here let's call it the ref one we can hit apply it doesn't really matter how you name it just make sure it has a name perfect and then once you have done that you can open up the elevation that's kind of viewing that reference plane head-on so let's open that up perfect and now we can go here to the roof tool open up the drop menu here we have the roof by extrusion and this allows us to create maybe the wildest shapes when it comes to roofs in revit so here we have to specify the work plane luckily we have created it so we can specify that by name and just choose our ref one hit apply uh here it's going to ask us for a level let's leave it at level two and there we go perfect now you can use the spline tool uh probably because it gives you kind of the the the most versatility and kind of the craziest shapes and as you can see you can create any type of roof that you can imagine let's now go back to the modify tool to escape out of that and then you can select it and kind of reshape that and of course you don't have to use the spline you can use the arcs or something like that i just prefer using the spline because it gives me kind of the most functionality of all of these now finally once i have created this i can go back to the 3d view hit finish and it's going to extend that and as you can see we have kind of a flowing roof i think it looks quite interesting now if i extend that over this wall i can hover over one of the wall segments hit the tab key it's going to now select the whole chain of walls and now i can attach the top base to the bottom of this roof so once they do that now you're going to notice that the the walls follow the bottom of that roof now in some cases you're going to want to shape the top of the at the top of your walls without adding an actual roof maybe it's some sort of an art exhibit or something like that well in that case you can simply select this roof and then you can hide that element and you're going to get something that looks like this which is a very very wild shape and just imagine that we have only used the roof tool and the wall tool to create something that looks like this now let's take a look at how we can use floors to create some curved shapes now for floors what you want to do the important thing is when you get started you want to keep your geometry simple so let me create here a rectangular floor hit finish and then let's immediately go create a floor that has 5 points just next to it and hit finish now if i go here into the 3d view and if i select this first floor if i go to modify sub elements it's going to allow me to select elements like the the sides or the points of this floor and it's going to allow me to change the elevation of those points now if i change the kind of the diagonal points it's going to create a shape that's called a hyperbolic paraboloid it's a kind of a tongue twister but it's a really cool shape it's used in architecture for some really amazing buildings i really like it it's a very uh efficient shape when it comes to construction so i i think it looks really cool and it's also really useful and it kind of creates a curved shape in a rectangular footprint now if you were to try this with this uh here pentagon or a five-pointed shape if i go to here to modify sub-elements and if i move a couple of these you can see what's going to happen is it's really going to break it into four different uh four different plates uh i guess you can say so it's not going to work with all the shape it's not it's not going to be organic uh one other shape that they like to use for kind of curving floors if i go here to floor let's try creating an arc like that and then let's offset that by a couple of meters just like that and then of course cap it at each point just make sure that the offset is back to zero just like this and then hit finish if i now go to modify sub elements and select this point and i can move it up and it's going to create a ramp which is really cool you can also try moving individual points around that can create an interesting shape i don't know that looks interesting i guess anyways so you can create some interesting shapes like this but as you can see it mostly works with four point shapes so just keep that in mind so let me just delete these two floors all together and now also the final kind of the project tool that they wanted to show you for creating these weird shapes or curved shapes is going to be the stair tool so if i go here to south elevation you can see that i've set these levels uh 1.6 meters apart just to have a small stair and then let's go here to the stair tool and i'm just going to have it go from level one up to level two and that's going to give me nine risers and also make sure that you're using the monolithic stair you can use the assembled stair but i found that it works not that good okay so now instead of using one of these tools here you want to use the create sketch option so if i just go here to create sketch it's going to allow me to go into sketch mode and then i can sketch out the stairs so let's try with a simple arc that goes like this and then it can go like that perfect let's create another one here off to the side maybe curve it a little bit differently like that and that's going to create a kind of a weird shape and you wouldn't think that this could actually be a stair but actually you can turn this into a stair you just have to add risers as you can see we have zero created nine remaining so let's go one two three four five six oops seven eight and then we have just one more perfect nine we can move this up a little bit perhaps okay so once we have our risers created we also need to add a stair path so just make sure you're using a stair path going from the bottom to the top hit finish and there we go so now if i go to the 3d view we have a stair that's kind of following this really odd shape now of course i didn't really worry about too much about the stair uh the length and the height of the steps but you can kind of think about that before creating this and i actually have a full tutorial on this which i'm going to link in the description of this video so make sure to check it out if you're interested in creating some really oddly shaped stairs and now it's time to move over to the massing environment now for that you can access that through the project by using in place massing but i prefer going here to families then starting a new family and they're choosing conceptual mass and then metric mass now if i just open that up here we're inside of the massive environment and ah in that course that they have mentioned the massing environment in revit there i show you what how to use this complex environment to create all sorts of complex shapes but also how to later on turn those shapes into actual building elements now for now let's go here and let's add a few more reference planes we do have some reference planes here they actually show in 3d in this design environment that's one of the reasons why i like it next let's go here to reference plane and let's add one here and another one here and now to select the reference plane on which we want to gonna draw we can just click on it and now it's selected so now if we show the active one it's going to be that one now we can go here to model lines and then let's use a let's go with the uh with this ellipse so for this i'm just going to turn this to draw on work plane just to make sure that we're set on this work plane and let's create an ellipse that looks like this perfect next let's go back to modify select this reference plane now that one is the the selected one the main one now let's go to model lines to ellipse again and then let's create an ellipse that looks kind of like that and finally let's go to modify select this reference plane making it the kind of the active one and then let's create another ellipse and place it just like this perfect go to the modify tool perfect now if i select all three of these and just make sure that only three lines are selected which you can see here in the properties panel now i can just simply select these create a form and it's going to create something that looks like this and this is a aloft that forms it basically kind of create kind of connected all of those uh ellipses together creating this interesting looking shape next let's cover the the sweeps and that for that let's select here the bottom plane and let's go here and i'm just going to use the spline through points so it's an interesting spline tool that looks like this so you basically place points and it's just going to be placing a spline that goes through those points now uh we can use this in order to create a shape so for example you can select a point and then that point is going to be the active reference plane and there we can add let's stick with the ellipse so we can create like a vertical ellipse like this and then we can go to the modify tool select the final one making that one active and now let's go and create a horizontal ellipse and keep in mind that you can add multiple profiles here along the way we have two more points we can use those in this case i'm just not going to do so so let's select the first ellipse the last one and or the the the end ones and then hold the ctrl key and add the line to selection as well go to create form and it's going to create a form that looks like this so it basically swept those two ellipses along this path connecting them in a continuous shape which looks really cool and finally let me show you how to create nurbs curves or surfaces which is pretty much as creating a blend but instead of having a completed form it's sort of just a surface so if i just select this reference plane here and go to the spline tool i can create an interesting looking spline like this go back to modify select the middle one do the same thing so i'm gonna create something that looks like that and then finally let's select the final one and create another spline there we go and now if i just select these three splines go to create form it is going to create a form out of those splines and what's really cool about this is you can still find the splines and then you can edit those and it's going to change the shape which is really cool so i can move this up and the shape is going to look like that and so on so it looks kind of like it's folded down here or something so there we go it's it that can look really cool and you can create some really cool curved elements just like this so there we go those are some of the basic approaches to creating curved shapes in revit both in the project environment as well as the masking environment now if you're interested in a full complete course on showing off the masking design environment how to create really complex shapes and i'm just understanding how revit creates these shapes so you can build whatever you like and then later on using that in the project we'll check that course out i'm going to leave it as the first link in the description so just make sure to see it okay so that's pretty much it for this quick little tutorial well it's not that quick but anyways it's a i think it's a useful tutorial thank you for watching make sure to comment tell me what you think about the tutorial give me ideas for future tutorials make sure to like and share this video it helps me out a lot make sure to subscribe and i'll see you back with another tutorial in a few days have a nice day

Channel: Balkan Architect

Views: 48,138

Rating: 4.972826 out of 5

Keywords: Revit, tutorial, english, learn, BIM, building information modeling, easy, fast, quick, how to, autodesk, modeling

Id: XcTIAaAZkEw

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020