Limiting Panel Size

Here's a fun little tip, something I gave myself a good dope slap for not figuring out earlier. Say you have a free-form surface, and you want to build it out of a paneling system. Presumably you would like to make it out of roughly similar, if not identical panels, to simplify manufacture.

Out of the box, Revit will dice up a complex surface like this, with surface divided into a "max 10'x10'" grid.

Notice that the panels have an enormous variation in size. This is because Revit uses UV coordinates to divide the faces and has to make a single measurement in each direction along the surface for the "Max 10'" measurement. The rest of the cells just take this initial spacing and run with it. For this surface, with a "max 10' division", I have a resulting grid system where the smallest cells are about 9.5' and the largest are over 30'. That's a big variation, and is a result of the single measurement of the U and V direction of the surface.

What to do? Most really irregular surfaces cannot be rationalized down into identical panel systems, but you can limit ranges of variation. In general, I am going to try and make Revit make more U and V measurements.

To start, I make a simple panel and load it into another curtain panel.

The host curtain panel system gets a divided surface. The divided surface is set to have a maximum division of 10'x10' with my base panel loaded into it.

This is the key to the optimization. Load this nested panel system into the free-form curvature system. The result is this:

So now after the initial measurement of Max 10' that Revit made on the whole surface, each nominally 10' or less cell is evaluated again to make sure it does not exceed 10'. The result is that I have a surface that is divided by panels that range from around 5.5' (if the host cell is slightly larger than 10') to 10' (if the host cell is exactly 10'). Perhaps this is not "optimized", but you do have more control over variation. I also think it looks way cooler, if not cheaper.