Inspired by parking lot lines wanting to be drawn on sloped/complex surfaces...
Imaging if the out-of-the-box parking striping family -- which only works well if your parking lot is completely flat -- could be drawn on a level and then "projected" down onto the surface it is hosted to (be that a floor or a toposolid). This way the stalls would stay true to plan dimensions and would "drape" accurately for visualization purposes.
(and before you tell me to use the railing workaround, this goes much deeper than that)
This idea could be generalized into a more robust "projection" system that increases modeling capabilities, reduces use of workarounds, and speeds up the process of reaching both "drawing accurate" and "rendering accurate" geometry with the same toolset. Our firm uses Revit as the sole "ground truth" for both rendering and drawing.
There are a few ways I think this could potentially work:
- "Subregion as Discrete Family": In the case of parking lot lines, specifically. Imagine it as if you drew a subregion of a toposolid with 4 lines to define the rectangle of a painted stripe... but instead of having to do that, those sketch lines could be defined within a separate family which could essentially "project" those sketch lines onto the surface. "Subregion as discrete family", you might call it? Furthermore, I would want that family to be able to define an offset and material definition. This feels like the easiest to implement, versus a more general approach to projecting geometry.
- A more robust, general "projection" functionality (sketch based): I think there could be various use cases that would benefit from a more general ability to "project" one geometry (or sketch) onto other geometry, with any arbitrary workplane and host. Use case: drawing control joints on a sloping sidewalk (or a wall in elevation) and have them appear accurately in renderings and in plan. Very similar to how "divide parts by sketch" works (wherein any arbitrary workplane can be used and sketch lines can overlap) I want to be able to sketch a series of lines on a workplane and have those lines create a projected "void sweep" (presumably defined by a profile family, and that profile would be aligned normal to the chosen workplane) across a shape-edited (or otherwise complex) host face. Furthermore, it could be useful to have "detail level" type control on whether to see the sketch lines (to accurately dimension to the centerline and reduce lines in plan for instance) or the actual modeled voids, or both.
- Furthermore, a similar "sketch based" approach could work for the parking line scenario -- draw your parking layout as single lines on the workplane, choose a "stripe width", material, and maybe even an offset in the properties, complete the sketch and the program does the rest. It can be this easy, if we make it so!
Thank you!
-David
