So, I made a script many years ago when first learning Dynamo Zero-Touch Nodes to animate Revit via Dynamo. The problem I found was, unlike Grasshopper, where you can create a counter node relatively easily, in Dynamo there was no node for this and it couldn’t be done via python (correct me if I’m wrong – I would love to know how it’s done).

To get this to work I had to create a Zero-Touch node and use the [CanUpdatePeriodically(true)] attribute, store the previous value in memory and increment on next evaluation. It was quite a learning curve at the time as it was my first time exploring Zero-Touch with Dynamo. Needless to say, I managed to figure it out in the end with a lot of googling and searching through the Zero-Touch examples.

The end product was this very simple, but effective animation…

The cool thing is that you can actually pan, zoom and rotate while animation is playing (which was a nice and unexpected surprise).

It’s been a very long time getting around to sharing this script. But if you want to play around yourself, feel free to download the very WIP Danimo Package here. You can find the Dynamo (v1.3.2 & v2.1) and Revit files (v2018) in the Extra folder in the package. I have tested in both Dynamo v1.3.2 and 2.0.1 and appears to work just fine. I have used only one third party package which is the Dynamo Text package, so make sure you grab that from the Package Manager.

NOTE: Make sure to Unblock the .zip file before unzipping by right clicking>properties and select the ‘Unblock’ button and then copying over to your packages folder, the default location is something like…

C:\Users\<Your User Name>\AppData\Roaming\Dynamo\Dynamo Revit\<Dynamo Version>\packages

You can also find this by going to Settings>Manage Node and Package Paths when in Dynamo and you should see your package path location there.

Hope you find this useful and thanks for reading!

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