Happy Halloween, II!

Another great year with the 2nd Annual Parametric Pumpkin Carving Internationale! Across the board, high quality, voluptuous vegetable facsimiles that each and all of you should be proud of. However, rules are rules, and we must pick only 3 from the patch to receive the coveted Buildz schwag. [All files can be downloaded from here.]

The Goodest

This one just makes me crack up! It’s made out of stacked walls!

Paul Aubin took the high road on this one and wrestled the standard Revit building elements like walls and floors into pumpkiny goodness. Well documented using good old fashioned dimensionable arcs instead of splines, and generally using the tools in the manner they were intended (if extremely), you could imagine handing this one off to a contractor (perhaps in outer space) and getting some results.

The Baddest

We were on the fence about whether to call Aristide Little-Lux’s pumpkin the goodest, the baddest, or the mostest parametric. It exploits all the loopholes available to the parametric engine in Revit, but it is not exactly flexible. It shows a virtuoso manipulation of the tools (look at the details around how the stem is constructed) but mostly by abusing the hell out of them.

Aristide’s pumpkin does nasty, unspeakable things to divided surfaces, plays fast and loose with categories and cut/join behaviors, and has more nests than a bedbug infested New York hotel. Like Hannibal crossing the alps, it will stomp an elephant right through your city if it is in the way. Like Hannibal escaping from maximum security prison, it will eat your face off it speeds things up.

For example, the segments are created by a two curves hosted on a divided surface in an adaptive component, hosted in a curtain panel by pattern with “vertical on placement” to control the orientation, which in turn is hosted on a simple cylinder which arrays the original 2 curves in a fan of segments. Why? Because it wants to, biatch!

We can’t really do justice to explaining what is going on in this family, but it is posted here. Just to say that it is an education, and understanding how all the pieces go together can go a long way to understanding the functionalities of the the conceptual modeling environment in Revit. It’s really very cool.

In the end, we have to call this one the Baddest. This is a pumpkin that you want to have on your side in a knife fight. It can claw, bite and pull hair if it has to, and it WILL kick your ass if you cross it.

The Mostest Parametric

Ryan Duell, of the Revit Clinic, gives a detailed step by step video of how to make this lovely pumpkin. It looks innocent enough when you open up the family, but the fun really begins when you start messing with the parameters.

Open up the file and take it for a spin. Using the given parameters you can do some nifty reconfigurations. But you can also tear down the whole geometry and build it back up from the scaffolding in different configurations too.

Special Shout-Outs

Jillian Bejtlich with this year’s Most Inhabitable Pumpkin (Revit).

John Fout (first 2 Mudbox images) and Dante van Wettum (3rd image, Revit, with some awesome parameters too) for pumpkins that scared the pants off our 7 year old Buildz intern.

Paul Munford, for his inventor pumpkin referencing my favorite movie Jack O’ lantern.

Thanks to all who submitted entries, and Happy Halloween!