Room Boundary Question

[jsnyder.68308]

We have a project (RAC 2009) with a looooong hallway - 400 feet long. The hallway steps down via a series of ramps encompassing 5 different levels and almost 14' of vertical drop between the highest and lowest level. We are having difficulty placing one room that fills the entire hallway. All the walls along the hallway are room bounding. Making adjustments to the room's upper limit and offsets does not help solve our problem.
If we place the room at the highest level and set the base offset to include the lowest level, the room stops at some seemingly arbitrary point along the corridor - there does not appear to be any room bounding object to stop it. It stops nonetheless.
If we place the room at the lowest level and set the upper limit to the highest level, we cannot get an enclosed room unless we create a room separation line at some "arbitrary" point across the corridor. The room separation line will stop enclosing the room if we move it too far up the hallway.
If we place the room at one of the middle levels, we have the same problem noted above with the room separation line "abitrarily" not working.
Does anyone have any insight into what might be causing this?

[jlinger]

I ran into this the other day trying to modify the room volume of a two story space that has different footprints top and bottom. On the upper level, room volumes would overlapped, but didn't give me the typical redundant rooms warning. I think this was because the bases of the rooms themselves didn't overlap. If there is a way to modify the 3D shape of a room it would be good to know.

[cliff collins]

I would expect by code that you may need some double-egress doors at some point
along the corridor, due to travel distances, etc? I doubt if code would allow 400'
of continuous open corridor?

If so, then you would have some walls to break the corridor into separate rooms.

Otherwise, you can use Room Separation Lines to create rooms which may fall at landings along the corridor at ramps as you describe. The fact that the corridor slopes
and drops should not be a problem--if you establish levels, use them to assign to rooms.

cheers.......

[jsnyder.68308]

Thanks for the responses.
Yes, I suggested that the team just divide the thing into two or more separate rooms and move on. I was treating this as more of an opportunity to teach myself, and them, more about room objects and how they behave. It's very strange that the result is different when you start from the top-down rather than the bottom-up.
I played around with the room volumes and looked at it in section to confirm the behavior. I too can get the rooms to overlap without error messages. Must be a new feature that the factory forgot to tell us about.