13 April 2022

How to use Orchid in Python

Some would state that this was about time, and why have we been waiting so long!?

Well, to be honest, I have found it extremely problematic that The Dynamo Team at Autodesk always has hidden several classes, and still does hide several classes, by setting the wrapped objects as internal.
This has always made me a kind of angry and made me decide that I would shield my classes as well so everyone who was asking “but why?” I would reply “Make the team change and I will change!”
However, we do all know that nothing coherent to Autodesk is changing anything, they do only maintenance. And if they change something, it is surely not what users/customers want!

Now some years have passed and I wondered why should I be the same as them!? Why should I not be a larger person than that team... this is why I now have opened all my classes for transfering data to the Autodesk API. However, there are still some things to consider, and this is why I make my setter private to prevent unintended breakdowns. All my classes that return Orchid elements do now return Autodesk elements by the keyword WrappedType.

An example on a class from the dynamo team
namespace Revit.Elements
{
    public class Parameter
    {
        internal Autodesk.Revit.DB.Parameter InternalParameter
        {
            get;
            set;
        }


An example on a class from the Orchid package
namespace Orchid.RevitProject.Common
{
    public class Document
    {
        public Autodesk.Revit.DB.Document WrappedType { get; private set; }


An example on how to use the Orchid package combined with Python.

04 November 2021

Move an entire model and its views #2

Once more I have made some functions which might interest others.

Since I released the nodes for moving objects and views, published in this post 1,5 years ago has many things have been improved. There are still some issues when moving elements where Revit “complains” about elements are being unjoined, however, after moving are the same elements being auto joined again!? Like some constraints will be unconstrained, and some groups need to be fixed.
However, it seems to be smaller issues compared to being able to control the model location at some tangible element or point rather than 0,0,0 is somewhere unknown!

The latest functions developed for this are moving elements in a workshared environment with or without designoptions.

Single model
Workshared model

18 April 2021

PDF export nodes

With the arrival of Revit 2022 has it finally become an option to export view to PDF format. This new feature has also arrived in the Orchid nodes which now support exporting into pdf files.


16 September 2019

Setting ViewTemplate

Do you use view templates to control views, I do. Especially do I use view templates for views there is put on sheets. Therefore does the latest build contain a series of nodes for view templates. Besides are nodes for views extended.


25 June 2019

Move an entire model and its views


Have you ever witness the challenge of working with a model that is started by someone who didn’t know the importance of controlling the project origin!?

As a university and an estate owner do we inherit many models made in projects where the scenario is that someone forgot to control this at an early stage so the model could have been corrected. First when the project comes to the handover phase is it then discovered that this very critical error occurs.

Therefore, I took this challenge to code the bits and pieces to be able to move an entire model including moving elevations, sections, detailing, and 3D views, etc., also including adjustments for grids, crop boxes, views location on sheets. All in all, everything inside the project should be transformed by a given vector.

This work made me walk along many paths, developing a variety of nodes for grouping, views, viewports, and grids. More than 25 nodes have been created.

However, In the final scenario, I ended up only using a few of these nodes, while I continuously tried to figure smarter and smarter ways to tweak data. The nodes developed along the way is released also, while these could be used for other purposes and/or minor other tasks than moving the entire project.


move to origin (the final graph)

---
nodes for spatial element (room, space, and area)

nodes for view, viewport etc.


nodes for grouping etc.

nodes for grids etc.





24 April 2019

Minor release 134.5.0 / 202.5.0 and major release 210.0.0


Revit 2020 (and Dynamo 2.1) has been released and therefore have I released my package for 2.1.x series. This has a huge impact on all version of the Orchid package since a large reshuffle of node locations has taken place.

Unfordenetly is the problems concerning migration not being solved with the Dynamo 2.1 release, however, it was not viable any longer to wait for a fix of the migration problem while it was slowing down my development.

This rather big issue will give users errors, and the only thing I can suggest is to address complains over this error towards the dynamo team at dynamobim.com forum and/or DynamoDS gitHub. I don’t find it suitable that I should correct this error, this must be an Autodesk issue.

26 March 2019

BuiltInParameter, Transfer/Copy, central/linked files

In this update have I added several new features in different areas.

Nodes for BuiltInParameter

Nodes for copying and transferring elements between different document

Nodes for opening, save and closing central files

Nodes for linking files into documents