Choosing a Room Name

The Properties Palette lets us make some choices before placing elements that in the past were not possible. For example we can decide what elevation mechanical equipment or air terminals should be first. When we place rooms, without bothering to fill out a room schedule in advance, we can decide what name to use before we place one. In the image I've changed the room name to Office.

If we need to place several rooms that use the same name all we have to do now is type it into the room's name parameter within the Properties Palette. If you don't like the name you see when you place a room later, just check the Properties Palette. Revit remembers the last value you put there.

Remember that you can easily place rooms that are defined in a schedule but not yet placed in the model, just check the list!

Linked Files and Delete Rooms

When you are opening a project with linked files (or reloading one) if you see a dialog giving you the option to Delete Rooms, please don't click the Delete Rooms button. Please!

Nobody will be happy with you if you do, not even you. It would be wonderful if Revit stopped offering the ultimate in self-destructive options in warning dialogs. Too often Revit's solution to a problem is a delete button. As the knight's in Monty Python's Holy Grail movie said, "Run away, run away!"

Tag All is Faster

No kidding you say. When rooms are involved the room tag feature is painful because it has to query all rooms in the view and turn on the special highlighting mode first. You can beat this if you select rooms first and use Tag All instead. You'll get much faster results, more responsive. That assumes you can effectively select them first.

Room Separation Lines - Agida for MEP?

Via email the other night, he writes...(edited a little)

We use Revit MEP. I’m doing some research on Room separation lines, as to how and why architects use them, and when is appropriate. The problem I am consistently running into is that room separation lines divide spaces as well. These divisions, while relevant to the architectural model, are ruining the possibilities of creating gbXML files without extensive work on the part of the engineer to remove the room separation lines, and then repair the damage done to the room names and numbers.

For example, imagine open library stacks with dedicated study areas. In the architectural file, they used room separation lines as a rectangle to create rooms and tags for these study areas. They were also used to define a corridor along one side of the stacks (but still in the same open area). For MEP these are really all part of one big room. We won't need to add dedicated air terminals to these areas, nor special lighting just for these areas. So any of the analysis tools in Revit using spaces will be wrong, as most of them use an average over the entire area, (CFM/SF, Average illumination levels/SF etc..). Further, we are unable to accurately or efficiently create a gbXML file for use in Green Building Studio, HAP, Trace, etc. This complication is greatly hampering many of the benefits of using Revit for engineers.

I’m not saying that room separation lines should never be used, there are perfectly good places to use them. Rooms or spaces that are actually going to be treated as a separate room, not a room with in a room.

I initially thought that architects were using these (in addition to the obvious) to check for programming requirements, and code compliance for areas and such but it turns out a lot of architects are using the area tool for those purposes. They were however using them for the room finish schedules.

From a program standpoint, I was surprised to find out that while room separation lines can be assigned to a workset and that workset can be unloaded (through a linked file) from the MEP model. However the Room Separations still existed. We just couldn’t see them. And even if that did work, we engineers would still need to correct/edit the space names and numbers manually now since the spaces wouldn’t match the rooms (Space naming tool wouldn't work).

He closed wondering if I could offer any advice, ideas or a solution.

The essence of my response via email:

HVAC Zones are meant to combine spaces into larger more coherent collections for engineering purposes. The example given above for the library is pretty common place, need to know how much area is dedicated to carrels as well as a corridor within the open space of the library. From the HVAC engineer's perspective irrelevant but not from the client's or the architect trying to satisfy them.

If room separation lines are "off the table" then the architect would end up using something else like actual walls and hiding them. They might end up asking Autodesk to make more elements room defining? Area plans could help document such things but then floor plans would be "ignorant" of what these kinds of "areas" are, no tagging possible, just "dumb text". Not ideal either. My greatest concern about room separation lines is when they are used as "band-aids" to try to fix room area issues, where rooms aren't bounded properly and not generating area values.

Regarding the workset comments. Worksets unload information but that doesn't mean Revit isn't aware of the elements that are assigned to the unloaded workset. When we unload a workset the walls are still there and that means so are Room Separation lines.

Any comments from readers??

Room Name Alternates

This is a repost of one I wrote back in December 2008. It came up again recently in a question via email and I noticed it's a pretty old post so I thought I'd plug it again.

Sometimes a name is just too much, too long, it just doesn't fit in a room. The stock Name parameter for a room is easy, it's already there waiting for us to us. When we use abbreviations in this parameter we end up with some full names and some abbreviations. An abbreviation of "T." for Toilet might be fine on a plan view but it is less than stellar in a schedule. We could use another stock parameter like comments to store an abbreviation instead but that subverts its usefulness for actual comments.

Shared Parameters to the rescue!

I've written several posts about shared parameters in the past so I won't go into making them again in this post (see bottom). This is what you need to do to get a new parameter working in a project.

Create a shared parameter (called Abbreviation for example)

Create a room tag family that uses your shared parameter, save the Family and load the family into your project

Add a Project Parameter (Settings > Project Parameter) using your shared parameter too. Assign the parameter to the Room Category

Use the parameter in your rooms, set-up a schedule and tag your rooms with the appropriate tag.

This gives the best of both worlds. Supply abbreviations for names that are unruly and don't bother for reasonable names. A schedule will make it easy to define either and those that don't have abbreviations don't "need" them. Just make sure you use the correct tag to display the value you really want people to see. You could also use this technique to provide a room name in a second language, if necessary.

I've posted a revised copy of my Egress Example project that contains a working example of the shared parameter, tag and schedule.

This post Shared Parameter File: A Little Clarification provides a full list of the posts I've made in the past on the subject of Shared Parameters.