With Lyrebird this all takes place back in the Grasshopper interface so you’re seeing why the data is organized in a certain way immediately. With our previous plugin that data was structured into a simple data tree, and then sent as a 2D array over to Revit where the data was mapped to a Revit family type, and then each list item was matched to a particular construction parameter (location point or rotation angle) or Revit parameter. We’ve tried to simplify the interaction between the programs, especially when it comes to mapping the Revit object to Grasshopper. The video below tries to show most of the ways you can use the plugins to create Revit objects using information derived from Grasshopper. On the Revit side, there are four commands added to manage Lyrebird and the elements that it creates. The interface we’ve created is still pretty simple there’s only one Grasshopper component that we hope has enough inputs and options to handle everything without being overwhelming. With Lyrebird we have attempted to think through all of the possible ways we may want to translate between Grasshopper and Revit, and work within the constraints of both of their API’s to make sure the resulting elements are still user friendly and can be easily manipulated either in Revit or through Grasshopper. This isn’t so much about translating geometry between programs but instead translating data between them. Lyrebird the plugin follows a similar logic as our previous interop tool, particularly that we create intelligent objects (families) in Revit so that when we use Grasshopper as a computational design tool, we structure the data in Grasshopper to make it easier to instantiate those Revit objects. If you haven’t seen this video you should take a couple of minutes and check out the Superb Lyrebird in action. The results of those discussions and their help is what we’re now calling Lyrebird after one of the great communicators of the animal world. We ended trading emails for a couple of months passing around different ideas about how we could improve the UX and element creation aspects and create a better overall plugin. Nothing much happened with it for a month or two until we were contacted by fellow Tech Studio alumnus and current Robert McNeel and Associates employee Dan Belcher.ĭan was kind enough to show it around McNeel’s offices and they gave us the opportunity to show it to them in person and start a discussion of how we could make it better. It was a great first pass, but we ran into some limitations with how it created elements and it really didn’t wind up getting used as much as I hoped. A few months ago we posted about an interoperability tool that we made to help us go between Grasshopper and a couple of other applications that we were working with in the office.

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