Starting this week, I will be delving into the world of Dynamo, Autodesk’s open-source, visual programming tool. Though it can now be used as a stand-alone program (via Dynamo Studio), I will be using it primarily as an add-in for Revit.

I have been putting this off for several months now, but I have recently started a more complex project that has some good applications for Dynamo.

Though I must admit, that as a landscape architect, I was initially skeptical of how Dynamo could be useful for creating landscapes. Similar to Grasshopper for Rhino, architects like to showcase how Dynamo can be used to create complex, computational designs.

This is great if you are an architect or structural engineer, but how is this useful in the landscape?

Well, the bottom line is that Dynamo gives you direct access to the Revit API. And it does so in a very user-friendly and understandable way.

This means that you can use Dynamo to create programs that can automatically create and modify Topography or automatically create and modify Floor sub-elements, which can save you a lot of time. Unfortunately, to access some of the more powerful tools, you also need to know some Revit API programming language. So I am also trying to learn a bit more about Python.

But to start out, I will mostly be using out-of-the-box Dynamo nodes. If you want to check it out, Dynamo is really quick to download and install (and comes automatically installed with Revit 2016). And there is now a Dynamo Primer, which is a brief yet comprehensive guide to using Dynamo.