ARCH 653 Project 1

ARCH 653 Building Information Modeling in Architecture

Project 2 – Parametric BIM with Dynamo

1. Objectives of the project 2

Torre Agbar is one of the largest buildings in Barcelona and is known for its unique façade with 4,500 windows in 40 different colors showing stunning visual effects. The purpose of Project 2 is to simulate the Torre Agbar’s splendid appearance as closely as possible. To achieve this goal, two main tasks will be conducted:

    1) First, to reflect the various color of windows, the curtain panels color control model will be developed. 

    2) Second, to simulate the unique exterior properties of a building, such as the brilliant window colors, image-driven mapping approach will be developed.

2. Task 1: Color change of curtain panels using dynamo

- Shuffled colors

For the 1st work, I developed a dynamo script to change the colors of curtain panels randomly. As depicted in figure 1, I created new five colored materials based on “Glass, Clear Glazing” in the Revit family and change the curtain panel colors randomly by using “List.Shuffle” node. When I run the dynamo script, the curtain panel colors change randomly. The output of changing the color of the curtain panels is shown in figure 2. 

Figure 1. Dynamo structure for random color change of the curtain panels

Figure 2. The output of the random color change of the curtain panels

- Random color distribution using Python script

As a second approach, different colors are randomly distributed using Python script. To distribute various colors randomly, an excel spreadsheet was used to code random numbers from 0 to 4 (with 20 columns by 24 rows) and then exported as a csv format as shown in figure 3. The whole dynamo node structure and Python script are depicted in figure 4 and figure 5 separately. Figure 6 shows the output of the preliminary practice 2. For random color distribution, I used an excel function, Random, to code the colors, however, we can manually control the color of curtain panels through different codes in excel spreadsheet. 

Figure 3. Random numbers using random function

Figure 4. Dynamo structure for random color change of the curtain panels using Python script

Figure 5. Python script for changing the color of curtain panels

Figure 6. The output of the random color change of the curtain panels using Python script

3. Task 2: Image-driven mapping approach using dynamo

- Image driven mapping on Curtain panels: Café Terrace at Night

For the third method, I developed an image-driven mapping model. This approach is to extract a color pattern from an image file and then apply the color patterns to the model. For this work, I choose a painting by Van Gogh called Cafe Terrace at Night (figure 7). The total number of the curtain panels in this model is about 1,540, therefore the pixels of the image file are set 23 by 67 to reflect the size of the curtain panels. The dynamo script and the output of this image-driven approach are shown in Figures 8 and 9, respectively.

 

Figure 7. Cafe Terrace at Night by Van Gogh

Figure 8. Dynamo structure for Image driven mapping on the curtain panels

Figure 9. Image driven mapping on the curtain panels

- Image driven mapping on Curtain panels: Torre Agbar

The image-based mapping approach was used to simulate the appearance of Torre Agbar as closely as possible. The dynamo script was already developed as described in figure 8 and we can use a new image for this task. The new base image (figure 11 (a)) is an original photo of Torre Agbar at night, the coolest moment of the day. For a better result, the original image was edited through several simple techniques using Photoshop and the revised image is presented in figure 10. Figure 11 (b) shows the final output image of the simulated Torre Agbar using Revit and Dynamo. 

Figure 10. Revised image

Figure 11. Comparison between an original photo and the simulated model of Torre Agbar

4. Video cliip