Whole-Building Shrink Wrap
Turning Your Complex Revit Model into a Lighter, More Portable Tool
Our quality of digital craftsmanship depends on accuracy, completeness, and many shared layers of detail. Our BIM models encapsulate a project’s worth of geometry, decision-making, collaboration, and coordination; our projects may start out as loose concepts, but gradually harden into a final design with input from a multidisciplinary team. The compounding layers of complexity bring with them massive amounts of
invaluable data.
Sometimes, however, we don’t need all the project data to complete a smaller task, and we don’t want to compromise the integrity of the shared model while we explore the answer to a question. What if a client wants to change the roof, or add a floor, or experiment with changes to an addition? What if a team wants to create a snapshot of the
building’s energy performance for a client conversation, or float some hypothetical revisions to one aspect of the design without committing to major changes?
LS3P’s Digital Practice Team has been working on a technique that will create a simple, portable, and editable massing model that will facilitate smaller design studies which are not weighed down by
extraneous data. The “Shrink Wrap” tool uses Revit “room” elements to identify key building elements and their bounding properties –floors, walls, roofs – and create a condensed framework of shape and massing. Much like the process of making a mold of a complex object like a human hand, removing the hand, and creating a duplicate out of plaster, the Shrink Wrap process taps into the existing figure/ground
properties of the Revit model to cast a solid skeleton form of the building which can then be manipulated and analyzed. (More specifically, the technique uses the Dynamo tool in Revit and involves creating a blank model, linking the destination file into it, identifying the bounding properties, joining them as 3-D elements, and then turning them “inside out” to make a cast of the envelope.)
Extrapolating this simplified data – height, building type, form – and packaging it in an agile model of the building envelope and spatial boundaries addresses a common issue of navigating BIM complexity when a more maneuverable tool is required. The Digital Practice Team developed this strategy internally based on intuition, innovation, and a loose idea found through Autodesk University. After exploring and vetting this technique through conversations with an Autodesk Sustainability Strategist and a developer of Autodesk’s Insight tool, the team has been running test cases through Insight and are quickly finding that
Shrink Wrapping a model can be a game changer for information gathering, collaboration, and accessibility.
Because the Shrink Wrap Tool extrapolates a simplified mass from our detailed building information model, this abstracted form opens the door to analytic processes that are hampered by excessive information.
Shrink Wrap takes the creative aspect of design –rapid prototyping and iterative refinement – and develops performance around that. The goal is to remove barriers to analytic modeling and performance study, at any stage of the project.
Look for more information to come on this strategy to improve workflows and maximize the use of our Revit models, and please reach out to Ruth Parr or Ethan Atherton for more information.
About the Contributor
ETHAN ATHERTON Assoc. AIA Emerging Professional ASSOCIATE
Ethan Atherton is a specialist in computational design and visual programming, and is passionate about applying these skills to elevate design.
Ethan earned both a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Sciences and a Master of Architecture from NC State University, and brings over 9 years of experience in working in architecture firms and implementing CAD and BIM standards.