Following on from my previous post, I decided to get a bit more adventurous with conceptual form and create a family based on David Fano’s hex glass panelling.

As you can see, this appeared to work well on my conceptual roof form and allowed me to create a series of different options:

The next thing I thought to my self was, “wouldn’t this look good if I rendered it”; but this can only be done at the moment within the context of a project file so there was only one place to go.

Having loaded the family into a project file, as I’d done several times in the past, I was a bit shocked to see the mess that it made of my panels:

This one had me scratching my head for a while, and investigating my interpretation of the curtain panel family, until I asked the Autodesk expert on these matters, Zach Kron, who kindly blogged the following answer:

http://buildz.blogspot.com/2009/05/flip-flop-fly-apart-panels-workaround.html

Apparently this is just a bug, which I can forgive them for now amongst all of this new stuff; and it relates to the following surface parameters in that if both are not set to the same value, the aforementioned problem will occur and the panels will fly out of position:

It is sometimes necessary to use these parameters to get the panels positioned correctly within the divided surface, so you may just have to work the grid settings a little harder in order to ensure that both of these settings can remain the same.

Upon setting both of these to be ‘ON’, and reloading the form family, the panels fell right back into position and rendered up quite nicely:

It also gave me the perfect excuse to try out some soft shadow rendering:

Hopefully this will be corrected in the not-too-distant future but hopefully this will be enough for you to avoid the issue until then!