Creating a quantifiable cladding system

Revit is a great tool, by far the best for creating BIM projects rich in Meta-Data.

One of the most impressive functions Revit has is the ability to instantly quantify any element you wish and produce a schedule with any information about that element you require. 

This post is going to cover two things, creating a custom curtain wall with insulated panels and how to schedule this info out correctly. 

There are a few ways to create cladding systems, here, i am going to walk you through creating a cladding system using a curtain wall, i find this way to be the easiest as it is very fast and requires very little work. 

First thing to do is create a wall type to act as your cladding panel, so give it the proper material make-up that a panel would be, here im using Timber clad and Zinc clad SIP's:

Create the wall type just like you would any other wall, with the correct material make-up your cladding panel has.

Once you have the wall type made, we now want to create a curtain wall type. So, select the curtain wall, create a new type. Set the system up how you want it to look/function but the only thing we are going to do differently here is set the "Curtain Panel" to the

wall type you have just created. 

Doing this will create a paneled system using your wall type. When doing this i tend not to put in any mullions, as cladding systems usually do not have any kind of mullions, but feel free to input some custom mullions to represent filler or border batons etc. (keep in mind this will modify the size of the panel)

Now when you place in your Cladding curtain wall, rather than glazing it will put in a proper cladding system with proper thermal values, render finishes and physical values. This is in no way a "work around" if anything, it is a very effective method, because we can now quantify all the panel systems and individual panels (and mullions if you input them) along with even being able to produce material takeoffs of each individual panel.

Simply create a new schedule (Schedule/Quantities) and select either Curtain systems/Curtain Panels/Curtain Wall Mullions and choose which fields of said category you wish to output. Now you have a cladding system that looks the part and is full of meta data and totally parametric with your schedule as a BIM project should be. Do the same process to get a material takeoff, choose new schedule (Material takeoff) and choose Curtain Panels then specify which fields you wish to include in the schedule:

By default the curtain wall will produce a uniform layout, which is very easy to modify. Simply switch to an elevation view, in this case i just removed segments of the grid lines to get the "stepped" effect. To do this, select the grid line you wish to modify, once selected you will have an option in the ribbon to "Add/Remove Segments :

click this button and simply click on the areas where you wish to either add or remove a segment on the grid line. It will either "Merge" two panels together if you remove, or "Split" a panel if you add.

You can get some great outputs by using this method, one final added perk of using wall types as your curtain panels is that you can now place the normal windows/doors etc. inside the panels.

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