Looking for some help, opinions, guidance on using Elefront and Human to organize my documents and produce blocks. I’m not doing anything as complicated as fabrication or detailing. I’m just trying to improve my architectural schematic design workflow, but still be able to generate options quickly.
Here’s an example with some simple window elements. Lately, when doing full facades in grasshopper, the baked result gets pretty heavy in Rhino. It seems like its time to break things up into blocks before baking. I like Human, however it lacks some of the quick lookup tools that Elefront has. On the other hand, Elefront’s requirement of baking blocks before using them gets cumbersome when doing quick design studies. Also, my work isn’t complex enough to break up into multiple reference files (yet).
I ended up mixing the two based on some suggestions in the forums:
- Human: “Create Attributes”, “Define Block” - Make, edit, update simple blocks in real-time without having to formally “bake them” (Elefront seems to make me bake them)
- Elefront: “List Block Document” (with Human “Item Selector”) - Use a drop down list to select blocks that I made using Human
- Elefront: “Insert Block” - Placing blocks by using a point/plane is much faster than relying on a transform from the original block location.
- Elefront: “Bake Objects”, “Bake All Elefront” - Easy bake using just the block geometry and then bake-all.
As a result the key-value relationship comes out a little funny, although I’m not sure I’ll use it unless I eventually take geometry into Revit.
If you have any suggestions to improve my workflow I’d be very happy to hear it.
facade test-human-elefront.3dm (616.6 KB) Facade_human+elefront.gh (57.5 KB)