Space Planning Revit - Easier in AA 2010.?

[andy.wiggins]

I have trawled thru the posts, and cannot seem to find an answer to my specific question.

In AA 2010, I can throw out space diagrams, un constrained to anything, and position them like coloured squares of card board. This is how we like to work on large briefs. We get an overall area schedule, break it down into faculties, then individual rooms. Just like card board cut outs. I can schedule them, perform area checks etc.

This is all the detail we need at an early stage. I can then add walls etc and build the design from there.

Revit seems to be very different in this dept. I dont want anyone to spoon feed me, but it appears the only way to do something like the above inside of Revit, is to use Mass objects. I want to be able to schedule each individual room, so it appears in the schedule, with its area, and perform queries on those areas. Is there a tutorial or something similar to how this works.?

We are currently looking at moving across to Revit from AA 2010, and have been extoling the virtues of a switch. Problem is, the first thing we will do on our new project in Revit is.. switch back to AA 2010 to get the spaces to work.. Seems like a poor start..!

Cheers in advance..

[eric.piotrowicz]

Haven't had a chance to test out this idea but it seems to me that you could do what you are asking by sketching your spaces with room separation lines and then define the room names, numbers, use, etc. A generic wall type would also accomplish this and it would give you some 3D representation of the volume of the room so instead of just cardboard squares you would have cubes. Either way would let you schedule and analyze the rooms and areas easily.

[patricks]

You could also create an Area Plan type for space planning and use area separation lines and area objects, and create an area schedule.

I believe you can also create areas or rooms directly in a schedule, and also create a field for target program area. The rooms or areas will be unplaced until you place them in a drawing. I went to a seminar about space planning done this way, but our firm doesn't really do this so I didn't pay very close attention. :p

*edit* I would use the rooms with room separation lines option, because then you can also create color fill plans and assign departments to your different rooms so the rooms will show up with various color fills. Should be quite easy to do in Revit.

[andy.wiggins]

Cheers Guys..

Will have a look and see what I can come up with.

Im just past the stage in Revit of "oh look how easy it is" and " its better than AA 2010 at this.."

I have now entered the "Right, I could always do it like this in AA 2010.. whats Revits version...."

Cheers

[brethomp]

Andy,

Attached is the solution that I use. It's a template that contains a bunch of "space" objects that are really just generic model families, with a bunch of instance parameters. They can be stretched and moved on the screen very easily to layout your spaces. They have all of the scheduling ability that you state above. I only included a couple of shapes, we have a big library of different shapes that can be loaded.

The template is a bit of a dead end street, since I purged out all the stuff you would need for a real building, but it is a fast way to study plan layouts, if you design that way.

[matt_dillon]

If you don't mind considering a 3rd party solution, Trelligence Affinity is an excellent space planning tool that also includes some really nice programming functionality. It's actually a stand-alone application, but it links bi-directionally with Revit Architecture.

It may be a bit overkill for what you're wanting to do, but you can get more info at www.trelligence.com.



I have trawled thru the posts, and cannot seem to find an answer to my specific question.

In AA 2010, I can throw out space diagrams, un constrained to anything, and position them like coloured squares of card board. This is how we like to work on large briefs. We get an overall area schedule, break it down into faculties, then individual rooms. Just like card board cut outs. I can schedule them, perform area checks etc.

This is all the detail we need at an early stage. I can then add walls etc and build the design from there.

Revit seems to be very different in this dept. I dont want anyone to spoon feed me, but it appears the only way to do something like the above inside of Revit, is to use Mass objects. I want to be able to schedule each individual room, so it appears in the schedule, with its area, and perform queries on those areas. Is there a tutorial or something similar to how this works.?

We are currently looking at moving across to Revit from AA 2010, and have been extoling the virtues of a switch. Problem is, the first thing we will do on our new project in Revit is.. switch back to AA 2010 to get the spaces to work.. Seems like a poor start..!

Cheers in advance..

[cliff collins]

I agree with the other posts:

1. Room Separation Lines
2. Generic model families
3. Trelligence Affinity for Revit ( the best way )

cheers.....

[rhilbert]

Our office tried Trellignece Affinity, but gave up on it in early 2010 because we found it to be too buggy to roll out to our space planners. The spaces it created were not very accurate so all spaces had to be manually resized once imported. And the presentation graphics were 72 dpi, which is unusable for client presentation purposes.

I felt that it was still in beta. I always felt it had amazing potential. And the owner/prgrammer was great to work with to resolve issues quickly. But that those hiccups can't be tolerated witht eh pace and scale of most of our projects. Has it improved since we stopped using it? THose of you who give it a thumbs up, have you expereinced similar issues?

I always hoped Autodesk would buy them, debug them, and offer it as a Revit add-on. I'll put that on the wishlist.

[DaveP]

Oh, to have a good Space Planning tool in Revit! Then I could finally get our Medical Planners to give up AutoCAD.
The basic problem Revit has with Space Planning is that Revit doesn't really have an object with boundaries that makes a Room. There IS a Room object, but it's boundaries are determined by the Walls (and RS lines) that it bumps into. So you can't just say "This Room is 12' x 18' and should STAY 12 x 18. The Room will change if it's bounding Walls move. Works great for CDs, but not so much for Programming and Schematics.

[Scott D Davis]

Oh, to have a good Space Planning tool in Revit! Then I could finally get our Medical Planners to give up AutoCAD.
The basic problem Revit has with Space Planning is that Revit doesn't really have an object with boundaries that makes a Room. There IS a Room object, but it's boundaries are determined by the Walls (and RS lines) that it bumps into. So you can't just say "This Room is 12' x 18' and should STAY 12 x 18. The Room will change if it's bounding Walls move. Works great for CDs, but not so much for Programming and Schematics.

Thats what Massing is for...make masses to the sizes/shapes of your rooms. they report area, surface area, volume, and more. Later, then can have walls/roofs/floors/etc applied to them to make the building. If the Masses change, the objects "glued" to them can be updated.

You can even make intelligent masses that can be "set" to an Area and when you strectch them in one direction, the other dimension changes accordingly to keep the area the correct value.

[rhilbert]

Thank you Brett for sharing your template with "space" massing objects. That is a great start. The rounded edges are extremely helpful in keeping the schematic plans "loose" so clients don't get to hung up on specific details about a room at this early stage. We are going to modify this for our space planning.

What we really need is a great workflow that doesn't require us to redo or re-enter data, and preferably could be done completely within Revit.

Master Planning - Our Space planners start with an excel spreadsheet. When working on large hospital projects, this gets very complex. At early levels this contains a list of room types and quantities (ex: 80 patient room type A, 48 exam rooms...) and basic size, department, and equipment info about them.

Schematic Design - We make spaces (mass objects) in Revit plan views. Typically we have 4 SD meeting with our clients, and offer 3 variations of space plans for each meeting. Around SD3 or SD4, we have things set enough that we would add walls, and create rooms in lieu of mass objects. Unfortunately there is no way for the rooms to read the info that was in the masses, so it is a manual transfer of data.

Our goal again is to be able to have the capability to automatically port info from mass objects to rooms.

We tried Trelligence Affinity and found it to not work as we needed (see my earlier post). I am going to look into Ideate software to see if this really works as they promote it. I guess I should post this to the wishlist. If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know.
Thanks,
Rose

[flarpe582151]

This file is what I was looking for! I have a new project in metric, do you have a metric version?


Andy,

Attached is the solution that I use. It's a template that contains a bunch of "space" objects that are really just generic model families, with a bunch of instance parameters. They can be stretched and moved on the screen very easily to layout your spaces. They have all of the scheduling ability that you state above. I only included a couple of shapes, we have a big library of different shapes that can be loaded.

The template is a bit of a dead end street, since I purged out all the stuff you would need for a real building, but it is a fast way to study plan layouts, if you design that way.

[MikeJarosz]

Our office tried Trellignece Affinity, but gave up on it in early 2010 because we found it to be too buggy to roll out to our space planners.

You thought it was buggy in 2010? We tried it somewhere around 2007! They were a startup software house and I think Larry Ciscon was not just CEO, he was actually writing the code! Whenever I hit a snag, I picked up the phone, Larry himself answered and altered the code right away. By the end of the day, I would have a new build. We tried it out and came to the conclusion that this wasn't even beta -- more like pre-alpha. Besides, everything I wanted to do I could already do in Revit, and that was in 2004. We felt at the time we were taking a big chance as early adopters of Revit, and this Trelligence startup was a step too far.

To be fair, Trelligence has probably matured in the following years, judging from the positive reviews I've read. But I still don't see a need for it.

[Duncan Lithgow]

No-one has commented on Scott's approach. I toyed with it but haven't tried. Does anyone other than Scott have good stories to tall about this approach? I'm thinking it's a shame that the data put into the masses can't be directly transferred to the later room objects - can it?

[mckierArch]

LMN Architects tech blog offers a decent plugin (graphic programming in Grasshopper and Revit) to generate masses from an excel spreadsheet using any selected mass family. It maps the parameters to the mass, then will map the mass parameters to a room. It works pretty well, and the masses will schedule just fine, but I've had trouble getting a mass tag to work and display the shared parameters, which are in the mass object. What am I missing here for tagging parameters in a mass? My Mass Family started from the standard mass family out of the box. Thanks--Rob
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