Hi All,
Over the past few months I have been working with one of our Bentley users, Tapani Talo, modeling a high rise tower using GenerativeComponents and OpenBuildings Designer. Mr. Talo had some very interesting ideas for a tower design and was looking for a way that he could conceptually model the tower without having a defined program or site. He needed a model where he could explore different design ideas, variations and what-if scenarios without endlessly rebuilding the model. A problem tailored made for GenerativeComponents.
He has generously allowed me to share what I learned throughout this process. I have put together a series of YouTube videos showing how I set up the GenerativeComponents model(s). These will be posted on YouTube over the next few weeks. The first in the series is posted today.
Establishing Tower Geometry
For those of you that have taken the GenerativeComponents QuickStart you will recognize many of the same techniques for creating a stacking model that drives the Floor Manager, but you will also see some new concepts like linking one GC model to another in order to use geometry in one model to drive geometry in another model. This turned out to be a very useful technique in working with such a large model.
I hope you enjoy.
Mary Chib
Awesome!
Jeff Brown said:The user of a tier-2 destination model is not be able to directly refresh from the original source model, nor should they be allowed to, since such a refresh might disrupt the intervening tier-1 destination model.
OK, take your point. But, I think that in practice a lot of designers will want to avoid having to hop back and forth when updating a model assembly. Imagine Drive Train<Axle<Wheel<Hub<Bolts and the Bolt has changed.
The way I see it, since all of the code behind the IGCM's have been copied into the destination model, any disruption should be localised to the destination model... initially, anyway?
User re-imports Bolt from Drive Train. If all goes well, user re-imports Hub. Check. Problems? Oh no, open up Hub, import Bolt into Hub*. Flex and debug. Switch back to Drive Train. Re-import Wheel... all the way back up to Axle.
*Hub may be used in another assembly that may not need that particular Bolt as a component, so won't have Bolt as an IGCM.
Initially, there may be a lot of miss-fires, but eventually as the graph matures, it would be good to give the user the option to refresh the whole chain / tree from the destination model. Most MCAD modelers have some kind of 'controlled' auto-update function and do not force the user to re-visit each component model.
Hmm, you're right. I see that IGCMs need more versatility than what I had originally designed. I'll add that to the list, as well.
Thanks, as always, for your feedback! It's very valuable and very appreciated.