When the BVN/Jasmax team reviewed the design of an inventive sunshade for a large New Zealand office building, the team response to Melanie Tristram, Jasmax Associate - Revit Manager was, "We have no idea how we are going to construct this in Revit. It is going to take so, so long."
Angular blades would make up the diamond-shaped panels. Blades of varying length and color were both perforated and non-perforated. Additionally, a rotation factor would be included as well. With dozens of individual possibilities for permutation with each single blade, the goal was to have "no double-ups." The tally of possible permutations devoid of any repetition: about 3.5 million.
BVN with Jasmax had already engaged in a much smaller scale project with some similar properties. In the firm's quest for a solution, they had made online queries with Ideate Software and, seeing the possibilities contained within Ideate BIMLink, they had downloaded the trial version.
After experiencing success with the limited Ideate BIMLink trial and further consultation with Ideate Director of Software Development, Glynnis Patterson, Jasmax became one of the early adopters of stand-alone Ideate BIMLink.
End result - It took minutes instead of days.
Tristram says of the use case, "The time savings represents more than the hours we did not have to spend. No one, certainly not our Revit users, wants their valuable time caught up in days of data entry. That process is unsatisfying and it is open to error. Ideate BIMLink improved our efficiency and accuracy." Ideate BIMLink allowed the team to harness the data on each individual blade and visualize how it would or could interact with every other one. On each and every occasion that they wanted to explore a potential set of interactions, without BIMLink, they would have spent a day and a half of tedium. With BIMLink, they achieved each exploration in about half an hour.
For the whole story: BVN with Jasmax Makes 3.5 Million Combinations Workable in Minutes with Ideate BIMLink for Revit
For a detailed workflow on a unique, randomized façade see this recent blog post on computational design with Ideate BIMLink.