Monday, April 20, 2015

How to Get a Centerline of a Structural Column Using DynamoBIM

I wanted to make this quick post and explain how I have extracted the centerline of a structural column. There are some Dynamo Custom Nodes that do not allow the Physical Column centerline of curve to be extracted.
If you want to extract the centerline of a column then simply follow these 5 steps below.

1. Select the Physical Structural Model
2. Extract the Geometry using the "Element.Geometry" node
3. Place vertices at all column locations
4. Covert all the vertices to points
5. Add the "LineByBestFitThroughtPoints" node to extract the centerline of the column
The image below summarizes this process


Note that all these nodes shown will create only one curve via the analytical model and also it extracts the centerline of MEP Piping, and Ducts. If you want to do that then simply select the MEP system family instead of the Structural Column family and enjoy! 

2 comments:

Andy Gradoville said...

Marcello,

Thanks for all the Great content, but as a beginner it would be so beneficial if you might add a little to the end of these posts explaining what these dynamo's could be used for in terms of real world examples.
again, thanks for all you do.

Andy

Michail Golubjev said...

This method doesn't work for pipes which are shorter than the diameter (fx. ΓΈ500 and 100 mm length).

I have found a method where the pipe geometry is exploded and centre points of surfaces at pipe ends are used to obtain coordinates and a centre line. See image: https://goo.gl/photos/hZdUUsKrMYD96FRL7