Parametric Patterns

Parametric Patterns

Turns any face in your model into a pattern, relief, fin, frame or kinetic façade study, and adds floor, array, scale and shape-combining tools so the whole design exploration stays inside Revit. Every result is native Revit geometry, created in one undo step, and can be found again with one click.

What it does

Patterns on faces — pick a wall, floor, roof or curved face and cover it with hexagons, circles, rectangles, triangles, diamonds, stars, parallelograms or cell-like random shapes. Choose solid blocks, a relief that fades in depth across the face, or void cutters. Set the grid, the cell size, the depth, a rotation, and optional random variation. Voids can cut a wall automatically; solids and reliefs can join to it.

Panels and screens — turn a picture into a pixel relief on a face (each cell's depth follows the brightness of the image), grow a space frame of bars across a surface (square, triangular, diamond or cross-braced), or line a façade with fins that rotate, twist and shrink progressively. The kinetic tool builds sun-responsive screens: opening petals, hexagons, discs, tilting rectangles, swinging fins or brick pixels that open more where the sun hits.

Reshaping a face — subdivide a face and regenerate it as a companion relief: extruded, tapered, twisted, pinched or rounded. The original element is never changed.

Floors — draw a floor from a closed chain of lines or wall centre-lines, fill the openings in a floor, merge adjacent floors into one, or split one floor into pieces along lines or a linked CAD drawing.

Arrays, scaling and combining — fill a floor with a family on a grid, repeat a selection with a step, a rotation and a size change per copy, scale the numeric parameters of selected families evenly, randomly or in a wave, and combine overlapping elements into one shape by union, subtraction or intersection.

Views and selection — apply a reusable colour theme to the current view or every view in the project, and select elements by category, family name, parameter value, host or group with rules you can save and reuse.

Renders and AR — export the current view as an image with a written prompt, ready for the image tool of your choice, and export selected or generated geometry as a 3D file that opens in AR viewers on a phone.

How to run it

Open a project in Revit and launch Parametric Patterns from BimCode's plugin list. The window stays open beside Revit, so you can keep selecting elements while you work.

A walk-through

1. Pick a tool in the left column. They are grouped by what you want to do: Generate, Floors and selection, Modify, Render and AR.
2. Follow the numbered steps on the right. Tools that work on a face ask you to Pick face in Revit first; tools that work on a selection read whatever is selected when you click Refresh.
3. Adjust the main settings — shape, grid, depth — then open More settings for offsets, rotation, random seeds and host cutting. When one of those is switched on, the panel stays open and summarises it.
4. Click the one big button — Generate, Draw, Fill, Merge, Split, Place, Scale, Combine, Apply, Select or Export. The result and any notes appear above the settings.
5. Select output in the header finds every element this plugin created in the project, so you can review, hide or delete a study in one go.

Everything runs inside a Revit transaction, so Ctrl+Z undoes a whole run.

Good to know

• Generated elements are named "ParaPatt · tool · run" so they are easy to find in schedules and the project browser.
• Source floors and combined elements are kept by default. Turn off Keep original only when you have checked the result.
• Automatic wall cutting needs rectangular, wall-aligned voids. Other shapes keep their cutters and try Revit's own cut/join instead; if Revit refuses, the geometry stays for review and the plugin tells you.
• Curved faces are covered along their own surface directions, so cells follow the curvature rather than a flat grid.
• Very dense grids are capped at 2,500 cells per run and 250 copies per array to keep Revit responsive. Run twice for more.
• The optional image service in Create render sends the exported view to an address you enter; the key you type is used for that run only and is never stored. Leave the address blank to export the image and prompt only.