android tv

In almost every case, I prefer Structural Columns over architectural Columns in Revit.  However, the architectural versions can easily be made Room Bounding.  How do we do this for Structural Columns?

Change the "Material for Model Behaviour" property in Family Category and Parameters to be Concrete or Precast Concrete.

Strangely enough, changing back to Other after reloading this Family had no effect - I could not make it non-Room Bounding again...

EDIT: In the comments, Chris describes the behaviour of Structural Columns in the Project - "Deleting the columns and placing new columns with the material as "other" will make the space non-room bounding again."


See image:

Part of knowing What Revit Wants, is also knowing what it Does Not want.  Sometimes, you can push the hack (or workaround) that step or two too far... and the result is unpredictable, buggy and kinda useless.

In the past, I have used various methods to create inplace or component families that are not 'officially' or natively available.  In this particular instance, I used the IFC round trip method to force the creation of an Inplace family with Category set to Rooms.  I also pushed this into a Component (loadable) family.

Great!  I have Room families.  But guess what?   The result is unpredictable, buggy and kinda useless.

In fact, if you open these projects, make some Room Separation lines and then try to place a Room, I would estimate that in 95% of cases, your Revit has already crashed.  The families will not accept a tag, and they won't schedule.  They seem to just sit there, destabilizing your Revit environment.  So why post about it?  Well, basically so that you can add this workaround to the aforementioned list of something that Revit (currently) does not want.

I have provided both 2013 and 2014 versions for your download and testing here:
RVTs that will crash Revit

Revit deals in realities.  The reality is, many Rooms are not rectangular.  So we can forgive vanilla Revit for not having a built in tool or method that could only really 'guess' at X and Y room dimensions for irregularly shaped rooms.

There are two workarounds that I think can be useful:

1. A Room Schedule that calculates X and Y dimensions for rectangular rooms only
2. A Model Family with built in nested annotation labels that needs to be manually stretched and updated to the assumed X / Y dimensions of the Room.  Just place the family and then adjust the grips.

I can't take credit for the Calculation method.  This uses a formula based on Perimeter and Area to establish calculated values for X and Y room dimensions in a Schedule.  I downloaded an RVT back in 2008 that demonstrated this method -- from ... somewhere.

Similarly, I can't really take credit for the Model Family with Annotation Labels idea for the family either.  Daryl Gregoire posted it years ago in a series of videos, and it was mentioned in this post as well.

Download this file to see both methods in action.  Be sure to review both the Floor Plan and the Schedules to see how it all works together.

I chose Casework because it has built in X, Y and Z parameters - meaning I did not have to use Shared Parameters.  I control visibility by placing these Casework families on a secondary Design Option.  You could actually use a standard Casework Tag instead of the built in annotation if you prefer.  The Casework Schedule is filtered by Type Comments, and the other good thing about Casework is that we can Schedule the Room that the Model family lives in.

Feel free to comment, even if you think both methods are a bad BIM idea ;-)

Ceilidh Higgins recently "submitted a talk for Revit Technology Conference on this subject, What’s in a Room: Revit Models,Room Data Sheets and Interiors. You can download it here.

What’s in a Room? from Ceilidh Higgins

Read more about Revit and Room Data at the original post:
http://themidnightlunch.com/whats-in-a-room-room-data-sheets-and-the-briefing-process/

Nice tip + addin coming from Trevor Taylor via Jeremy Tammik - it shows how to rename Interior Elevation views by the Room that they reside in.

Download:
Here is a complete sample project including a test model in case you’d like to check it out yourself.
Many thanks to Trevor for this useful tool, his research, implementation, and generous sharing.

Read more / via: 
The Building Coder: Rename View by Matching Elevation Tag with Room

You can use the Wall Opening tool to allow Revit Room elements to flow between spaces.  Other methods are not very reliable or just will not work.  So, don't forget about this little button on the Ribbon:



Tip via:
Non Room Bounding Wall Opening - Autodesk Discussion Groups