Warping Tool
- jcunningham
Description
This tool will automatically warp elements to the selected locations. The tool has a modeless dialog box that allows the user to see and manipulate the warp in real time. Because this box is present on top of Revit and the user is allowed to use Revit while this tool is active the inputs may seem to stop working. This is not a bug, if the inputs seem to stop updating the lines this means Revit has determined it is busy with another tool. If this happens, try to close any tools other than the warping tool and try to update your numbers again. This should fix this issue.
When the tool is clicked it first prompts for the user to select element that will be warped. These elements must be inside the warping bounds which are selected later. Once the elements for the tool are selected the user is asked if they would like to use a custom working plane or use the active working plane. This plane is where the base non-transformed points will lie. Once a plane is specified by either choosing a plane or using the active working plane the user is then asked to select 4 points on this plane for the basis of the transformation. These points are visually represented by colored spheres that appear where a point is selected. These points must be ordered in either CW or CCW direction and cannot intersect. This will display the plane and points on which the selected elements will be warped.
Using the new window, the user sets offset heights for each point that are saved and used to calculate the offset and angle of the warp on the selected elements. All drawings are created using AVF to create solids and set colors. Visually the user can see the offsets shown by the orange wireframe created.
Once the user has chosen the desired offsets the tool will use these points in Revit’s 3D coordinate system to calculate the corresponding offsets for the selected elements that were selected. The points on the element that will be used for calculating the offset and the angle are both end points of the selected element in the center of the member. Specifically, these points are the “location” property of the Family Instance and then the second point is found by getting all vertices on the solid in the Family Instance and dotting them with the Facing Orientation. Of these new values the greatest value will be used to calculate the Family Instance length which can then be multiplied by the facing orientation plus the first point to calculate the second point.
Once both evaluation points are known for each member the tool will compute hat functions at each corner point giving a value that can be used to calculate the offset at a given (x, y) location. Once the offset calculation is known using any offset point from the Family Instance points will allow for an angle to be found. These found values are placed in 4 parameters, 2 for each side of the Family Instance. The parameters that hold these values are set in the Warping Tool Settings.
The Start of the member uses the Mark End Warp Offset and Mark End Warp Angle parameters for the offset height and warp angle respectively. The end of the member uses the Opposite End Warp Offset and Opposite End Warp Angle parameters for the offset height and warp angle respectively.