Panel Pattern Fab Pro

Panel Pattern Fab Pro

Turns any surface in your model into a patterned facade of real panels, with the mould count and flatness checked before anything is placed.

Pick a face, choose from more than fifty patterns, watch the result in a live 3D preview, check whether it can be built, then place every panel in one go. One undo takes it all back.

How to use

Open Panel Pattern Fab Pro from Revit with your project open. The pattern gallery loads straight away, and the adaptive families in your project are read automatically. Then work down the six steps on the left:

1. Surface — click Pick face and select a face in Revit: a mass, a wall, a roof, a generic model. Pick several adds faces one at a time, Whole mass takes every face of an element, and Drawn boundary panels the area inside a closed run of model lines (move a line and the panelling follows). Faces that share an edge can be panelled as one continuous surface, so the pattern runs straight across the joint instead of restarting.
2. Grid — set how finely the surface divides, either by number of divisions or by the panel size in millimetres you want. Choose what happens at the edge: keep panels whose centre is on the surface, keep only whole panels, or keep everything.
3. Pattern — pick from the gallery: everyday quad, triangle and hexagon grids; masonry bonds; tilings that mix several shapes; aperiodic fields that never repeat; Islamic star patterns; Japanese lattice patterns; and structural layouts of mullions, bracing and screens. Only the sliders a pattern responds to are shown. You can also cut the corners off any pattern, and add attractor points or curves that make the grid pack in, the panels close up or twist, or the family change the nearer they are.
4. Panel — choose what goes into the model: an adaptive family for each kind of panel the pattern makes, mass faces, or lines. With families, only those with the right number of corners are offered, and you can mix several types within each kind — checkerboard, by course, by column, scattered, or flat panels against curved ones.
5. Analyse — read the numbers that decide whether it can be built: how many panels, how many genuinely different panels (the mould count), how many are flat, and the worst distance off flat. Set your own fabrication limits and see how many panels fall outside them. Export schedule saves every panel to a spreadsheet file with its measurements and corner coordinates.
6. Place — name the entry in the undo list, choose whether panel data is written onto each panel, and click Place. Panels go in in batches so Revit stays responsive, but the whole run is a single undo.

Good to know

• The preview is built from exactly the same calculation as placement, so what you see is what goes into the model. Drag to spin, shift-drag or right-drag to slide, scroll to zoom, and click any panel to see its area, edge lengths, corner angles and distance off flat.
• Display options colour the preview by panel kind, mould type, off flat, area, proportion, family, course, attractor field or fabrication limits, in five palettes. Any colour in the legend can be changed, and clicking a legend row shows only that kind. Joint gap, lift-off, shading, opacity, background, an orthographic projection and a face-on view are there for studying elevations.
• Some patterns make more than one shape — a tiling of twelve-sided, six-sided and four-sided pieces, or a star pattern of stars and the pieces between them. Each kind is listed separately in step 4 with its corner count, gets its own family, and all of them are placed in the same run.
• The star patterns are drawn the traditional way, from the midpoints of an underlying tiling, so they run continuously from tile to tile. Point sharpness moves between the obtuse, median and acute families, and the corner-star variants also let you set the star size.
• Panel data — mark, type, course, column, area, off flat and edge lengths — is written as shared parameters, so a schedule grouped by type is your mould list, and the facade can be tagged and exported like any other element.
• Mass faces are the right choice when you want Revit's own by-face tools — curtain system, roof, wall — to build straight onto the pattern. Lines can be reference geometry (one element for the lot), model lines you can snap to and edit, or detail lines flattened onto the view you are in.
• Any setup can be saved by name at the top of the panel and loaded again on the next project.
• Panels missing along an edge come from the edge setting in step 2. Two faces that won't join need to share an edge — faces that only meet at a corner are panelled separately. If no family is offered for one kind, the corner count has to match: a twelve-sided panel needs a twelve-point adaptive family. Load one, then press Rescan.