designviz
2010-01-04, 07:41 PM
We are doing some apartment buildings and need to represent room areas in two different ways, Unit Plans and actual Room Plans. In the first case we need a room boundary around an entire apartment unit and labeled with a Unit Name (typically just UNIT), and a unit/room number and in some cases possibly SF, along with a corresponding schedule.
No big deal. However, at the same time, we also need to show in different views the individual units themselves with actual room names, numbers and SF, along with the corresponding schedule.
We have determined two methods so far to deal with this:
1) non-BIM method - If there is no need to calculate and display the SF on the plans and no schedule is actually required, we simply created an annotation tag that allows the user to modify the Unit Name and Number as needed.
2) BIM method - Using Area Plans and not to allowing Revit to automatically select wall edges when initially creating the plans, we manually place Area Separation Lines to establish all the desired edges. We then created Area Tags similar to our Room Tags that would allow us to display the tag information in various ways. This also allows us to schedule these areas with SF, etc. if desired. The only inconvenience to all this being that Area Plans by default get created in their own category in the Project Browser and thus any common annotations between these and the normal floor plans have to be copied around accordingly, which at times could pose some coordination issues.
We did also consider creating filters to turn on/off specific room separation lines based on Unit or Room to then be able to create Rooms accordingly. However, we were unsuccesful in figuring out a way to create such a filter, and somehow creating a visibility parameter and assign it to room separation lines. We thus abandoned this in favor of method 2 above.
Therefore, just curious if either or both of these methods make sense, are in keeping with Revit's intended design, if there are ways to improve these methods and/or if there are other best practices for dealing with this?
No big deal. However, at the same time, we also need to show in different views the individual units themselves with actual room names, numbers and SF, along with the corresponding schedule.
We have determined two methods so far to deal with this:
1) non-BIM method - If there is no need to calculate and display the SF on the plans and no schedule is actually required, we simply created an annotation tag that allows the user to modify the Unit Name and Number as needed.
2) BIM method - Using Area Plans and not to allowing Revit to automatically select wall edges when initially creating the plans, we manually place Area Separation Lines to establish all the desired edges. We then created Area Tags similar to our Room Tags that would allow us to display the tag information in various ways. This also allows us to schedule these areas with SF, etc. if desired. The only inconvenience to all this being that Area Plans by default get created in their own category in the Project Browser and thus any common annotations between these and the normal floor plans have to be copied around accordingly, which at times could pose some coordination issues.
We did also consider creating filters to turn on/off specific room separation lines based on Unit or Room to then be able to create Rooms accordingly. However, we were unsuccesful in figuring out a way to create such a filter, and somehow creating a visibility parameter and assign it to room separation lines. We thus abandoned this in favor of method 2 above.
Therefore, just curious if either or both of these methods make sense, are in keeping with Revit's intended design, if there are ways to improve these methods and/or if there are other best practices for dealing with this?