curtain wall panel with angled face

[kgatzke]

I tried to create a curtain wall panel with a panel component that's set at an angle.  I thought, foolishly, that the easiest way to do this would be to snap the ends of a line based family to the intersections of planes that define the endpoints. Silly me.

I tried constraining the points to both planes but as soon as I changed the width of the panel there were constraint errors with one of the ends of the panel trying to separate from its constraining plane.

I drew a reference line between the points.  This seemed to work fine as I could stretch the width of the curtain panel and the reference line's end points remained locked to the two intersections.  I then aligned and locked the component to the reference line but when I changed the width I get another constraint error.  Apparently the angle of the component is a stronger reference than the reference line.

My last hope was that at least I could use trigonometry and control the width of the panel by an angle parameter.  I was warned by my BIM manager that curtain wall panels have no width parameter and when he had tried drawing information from a reporting parameter in a formula in one his families it wouldn't work. I held onto hope and tried setting it up but got no further than trying to establish a angle parameter between the component and a reference plane.  The simple act of creating a parameter was trying to move the component away from the anchor point.  At this point I gave up.

There has to be a way to do this.

[ToanDN]

I will look at the family later. Have you tried nest another family in the curtain panel family?

Edit: I see you already tried a nested family. My apology.

[kgatzke]

I'm trying nesting within nesting and that's not working either.  

The attached family has a nested generic model family with length controlled by parameter.  The panel changes length relative to the origin just fine.  But I get damned constraint errors if I try to control its angle.

The main problem here is I can't seem to create a family that will pivot.  Nevermind the fact that we seem to be unable to control a line based component by two endpoints!

[ToanDN · Accepted solution]

Try this one.

[kgatzke]

I see you got the panel to work by doing it with a direct extrusion rather than a nested family.  I started with a nested family right off the bat because usually that's the only way to get rotation to work well in a family.  Not the case here.

I had to make one tweek though.  The panel was failing at panel lengths of less than around 18" because the panel thickness was dropping below some limit.  I crossed two fingers and locked the back face 3/4" to the front face and not only does the panel stay the right thickness I can narrow it right down to 0 without a constraint error.

Thanks!