A Doors Life

As I mentioned in an earlier post I presented a session called "A Door's Life" at the recent Central States Revit Workshop. It tackles creating a host door family that nests 2 panels, 2 frames and 2 handles. It also features a nested clearance form for clash detection and a variable plan swing angle. The host door permits rotating the 3D panel and hardware to any angle as well, though 0-180 is probably the range that's most useful.

If you are interested in more information this is the handout that attendees received (embedded here).

As the handout will tell you it isn't meant to be the perfect door. It's a demonstration of concepts and how to put them all together. If you're lucky you'll end up with something you can use right away or at the very least have a good idea how to get where you want to go.

Click to Download the completed files for each exercise.

Change Door From and Door To

These settings for doors are determined initially by which side of a wall the door swings into. A door swinging into a room inherits that room as its "to" value. Later if someone flips the door to swing out of the room the parameter does not change. This is intentional and I've written about this before.

Harry started Boost Your BIM a few months ago and he's really dedicated himself to it, bravo! Back then he asked me for some ideas and naturally my mind went blank I could only muster a couple ideas. The beauty of blogging is that the more readers you have the more ideas you'll get. He's been keeping busy with many interesting examples.

The other day I was chatting with a Revit user who was expressing frustration with the From/To issue and I thought that a simple "click this click that" experience might at least improve the situation for him. I wrote to Harry and a day or so later we've got this to consider. Cool!

The Missing Door

There are two situations that trip up new users when it comes to doors. I wrote about about one of these Reviteristics in April 2010. That post is about Openings and this one is about curtain wall panel doors.

When people first make a curtain wall that is supposed to get a door they quite naturally assume the door tool is the right place to start. Wrong. Curtain walls are special and they are made up of curtain grids, panels and mullions. A curtain wall door is really a curtain wall panel. They are a panel because Revit needs to keep their width and height flexible, to accommodate any changes we might make. A regular door family can vary in size but it can't respond to curtain grids being moved. We can't even put a regular door in a curtain wall. That's not entirely true but I'd have to get into yet another Reviteristic, using other wall types as curtain wall panels.

We need to understand that a door in a curtain wall isn't a "door", at least not to the Door tool. To make matters a bit more confusing Revit treats this curtain wall panel, pretending to be a door, as a door in schedules and in Visibility/Graphics.

It would be better if we could click on the Door tool and have the option to place a "regular" door or a "curtain panel" door. At least this way it would become immediately apparent that there is a difference!

Curtain wall panel doors are found in the Doors folder within the content library. That seems slightly logical, in the same way that Opening families are found there. When we want to load a curtain wall door family, browse to the door library (stock content location).

Placing a curtain wall door is a bit different than a regular door in a wall. We don't use the Door tool. We have to swap out the panel that should be a door with the curtain wall door family that you loaded. To do this we need to use the TAB key to select the panel and then use the Type Selector to choose the curtain wall door family instead.

Once you do this you'll have to make sure that the curtain grids and mullions are adjusted to report the desired size. If you set the grids and mullions before the door is in place you'll find that the size is not quite the clean numbers you probably wanted. You can resolve this with mullions that use different offset values or just re-position the curtain grids until you get a cleaner door size.

I captured another video in the "Five Minutes with..." theme.

If you want to create a new curtain wall door family you ought to examine and/or reverse engineer the stock one first. You can start from scratch with the family template (Door - Curtain Wall.rft)

Party Wall Doors

You know the doors that are in hotels that pass between rooms. They make it easy to rent two rooms side by side, one for kids, one for the parents...or co-workers traveling to a meeting etc. I got a question via email asking how to approach this. The issue expressed was that Revit won't let you put two doors on top of each other. They want to list two doors in the schedule (one for each side) so the more or less obvious solution of showing both panels and swings in one family didn't cut it.

One solution is to edit the door family and eliminate the Opening element and replace it with a void instead. This allows you to adjust the depth of the void so it only cuts one half of the shared wall. Place two doors and align them...voila, done. If you make this an instance parameter driven option your regular single flush door type could pull double duty, cutting all the way through a wall or only half way.

Another approach could be a single family that uses two nested (and Shared) families. The door could be assigned to the Generic Model category so the assembly doesn't schedule in a door schedule, the nested shared doors (assigned to the door category) do instead. Alternatively the category could be assigned to doors too but you'd either have to filter out the assembly or the individual doors because you'd have an "extra" door.

Whatever solution we use we do have to consider how "we" schedule doors and how the product is dealt with by a manufacturer. Since the frame has to built to accomodate two panels it might actually be better or correct to create a single door family that just happens to have two panels. Everything is a bit trickier the deeper you look at the question, at least when you aren't just concerned with what a door looks like in a plan view drawing.

The Door From and To Values

In October of 2009 I wrote a post that explains the way Revit determines the parameter From Room and To Room settings. This is just an echo of it because I've seen a few mentions of the issue lately elsewhere on the "internets". There's a video too!