Written by Anthony Hauck For the last 8 months, the Project Fractal team has been preparing for the European Revit Technology Conference (RTC) in Porto, Portugal, readying the class “Generative Design with Project Fractal” for which we signed up last year. At the time we proposed the class, truth be told, we had a lot more speculation than a working service, but the target helped us focus our efforts around a couple of workflows, attendant Dynamo graphs, documentation, and stability.

I’m happy to report the class went very well, with about 40 people attending. Matt Jezyk was kind enough to take a couple of photos of the class in progress, where I talked about the Space Plan Generator, now found in the “extra” folder of the “SpaceLayout” Dynamo package:

… and then the Facade Generator, to be found in the “extra” folder of the “EnergyPredictML” (ML for “Machine Learning”) Dynamo package …

We’re gearing up to turn the Space Plan Generator and Facade Generator into open source projects on GitHub, but until then feel free to root around in the example Dynamo graphs and data in the referenced Dynamo packages. The “EnergyPredictML” is particularly interesting because it links to an experimental service the Insight 360 team created that delivers rapid energy use estimates based on a few building characteristics. More on that in a later post.

One other fun feature is the upgrade to the File Path node in Dynamo Studio 1.2, which allows seamless (really!) uploading and cloud pathing of external files referenced by the Dynamo graph uploaded to the Customizer and Project Fractal. Both the Space Plan Generator and Facade Generator rely on uploading external files, CSVs and SATs, to create the options from their respective graphs.

While I was at RTC, I had the pleasure of meeting Jesper Wallaert from MT Hogaard, who gave us permission to share his complete video of using Project Fractal for a parking garage project, along with the workflow video showing his use of FormIt and the Customizer to bring the design into the site context and try some further options before showing the completed design in Revit:

 

In short, the conference was a great success, with a number of class attendees following up for further work with the Project Fractal team. The Alpha now has over 300 participants, and we’re happy to add more.  See https://home.fractal.live/