Navigating The Interface And Node Library

- [Voiceover] Let's begin by launching Dynamo and then we'll take a quick

look around and familiarize ourselves with the user interface. Now at the time
of this recording Dynamo comes in two flavors, Dynamo for Revit, and
Dynamo Studio. They're both very similar, nearly identical. The key difference
though is that Dynamo for Revit runs like a plug in inside of Revit and
contains a section of the node library specifically for interacting with Revit
elements and data. Dynamo Studio runs independently of Revit or any other
application. In this course we're going to use Dynamo for Revit, but you
should be able to follow most of the examples and the exercise files with
Dynamo Studio as well. Before you open Dynamo for Revit, you'll need to
begin inside a Revit project or a Revit family.
To launch Dynamo, click the Add-Ins tab, and select Dynamo. Then Dynamo
opens and displays the start page. Here you'll find options to begin a new
Dynamo graph or open an existing one.Below that, you'll also see a shortcut
to open a few of the Dynamo files you've worked with recently. In the top right,
we see links that will take you directly to dynamobim.com, or to the Dynamo
forum, which is an active community of Dynamo users who post questions
and answers to problems that arise as they're working. If we scroll down a bit,
we can see a shortcut to several sample files that ship with Dynamo, which
are a great way to learn basic workflows.
I highly encourage that you check these out while you're getting started. Let's
go ahead and click the New button to create a new home workspace. Here we
are in a brand new Dynamo graph. This is the interface you'll see while you're
working in Dynamo. Across the top of the window are our menus, where we
can do things like save our graph and open or start a new one under File and
change various settings and options in Settings. Edit has a few features for
keeping your workspace tidy such as align, group, and clean up node
layout. Below our menus we have the toolbar, which offers shortcuts to do
things like create, or open a graph, save your work, and undo and redo.
Most of the Dynamo window is our node library on the left and our workspace
on the right. The node library is organized as a sort of tree structure. As we
click on titles we see in the library, we can expand and collapse different
levels of the library. At the top level, the library is organized into several
different libraries. Some of these libraries are named after the type of data
that its nodes function with. For example, nodes that work with geometry can
be found in Geometry. Nodes for interacting with Revit are found under
Revit, and Office contains nodes for reading and writing to Excel.
The Core library contains nodes for general use of Dynamo. Just about every
Dynamo graph is going to need to run on nodes found in there. Clicking on a
library will open it and show the library's categories, which is where more
specific and descriptive names for the nodes can usually be found. Clicking
on a category reveals a list of nodes that can be dropped into the
workspace.Within each category, nodes are organized into three
subcategories. Create, which is indicated by a green plus sign. These nodes
often create a new object or element. Action nodes, which are indicated with a
red thunderbolt, tend to take an existing object or element as an input and
modify it in some way.
Finally, there's query, which is a blue question mark, which usually extracts
information about the object or element that you provide as an input. These
subcategories can be very helpful while you're still learning your way around
Dynamo. Chances are you'll need to create, modify, or query something, and
hopefully that something coincides with the name of the library or the
category.Clicking on a node will place an instance of that node into your
workspace. At the very bottom of our Dynamo window is the execution
bar. This allows us to set how frequently Dynamo runs the algorithm that
we're writing. If we have this set to Automatic, Dynamo runs the workflow
anytimethere's a change made in the workspace.
Changing the setting to Manual will display a run button and Dynamo will only
run the workflow when we click on it. This can be helpful if your graph needs
to process large amounts of data, or writes a file to your computer, since
these can take a few seconds or a few minutes to run. Okay, that's enough
looking around. Let's get started placing and connecting nodes.