Rooms & Space Naming utility

[DaveDH]

Dear Architects,

I'm over here from the MEP forums and a few of us have been having trouble with the Space Naming utility not working.

Here's how it's supposed to work. When we, (an MEP firm) get an architectural model to link into our MEP model, we create Spaces which are essentially duplicates of Rooms, except the Spaces have mechanical, electrical, and lighting data built in. The Space Naming Utility allows us to transfer the Room Names and Numbers automatically from the linked arch model, which is huge. So when it doesn't work it's huge in a bad way, because we have to manually enter and carefully notice every time the room names and numbers change and manually edit them.

Here's a clip of my post from the MEP forum:

"But I have the same problem with projects from a certain architect. When we first noticed the problem we opened their arch model and tried to find some setting or check box in their rooms but couldn't (and all the rooms were placed properly). As far as we could tell their rooms were fine, except for a few extra fields/parameters. It turns out they had a consultant come in and set up all their Revit for them. So when we asked the architects about how they modified their rooms, they had no clue.

I think I'll go over to the Revit arch forum and pester them for an answer, because this problem is less than useless. It's like anti-BIM. It's even less useful than having the room tags in an xref in AutoCAD."

So if you archies have any answers to what might have happened to those rooms, it would be a big help.

Thanks!

[Alex Page]

Just a quick thought (I'm coming from Revit Architecture) - but when we link in another building, we have some options within the type properties of that link that relate to rooms - you have anything obvious in there that needs ticking or something?

[DaveDH]

Actually, as soon as we link in an arch model, we check the Room Bounding box, otherwise we couldn't create spaces in the first place. But, we did figure what happened. See below for what I wrote for the MEP forum:

"So we dug around abit more and discovered that the architects set up some phases. So, using "Transfer Project Standards" we transfered the Phase Settings over from their file. Then, after experimenting a bit more, (after things disappeared) we selected the linked model and opened up the Type Properties window where the Room Bounding checkbox is located. Under the Room Bounding checkbox is a button called "Phase Mapping". Click this and a window opens showing the phases in the MEP model and the phases in the arch model. Make sure they match.

In the process, we somehow lost all the spaces we had originally created, but we placed new ones after we got the phases figured out and tried the Space Naming Utility and it worked. Fortunately, we're at the beginning of the project so we didn't get messed up by the phases, but I have feeling that if we had tried this halfway through project we would have lost more than just spaces. So be careful."

This is one thing, as architects, you might want to consider mentioning to the MEP firms, that you have set up phases that differ from the default phases. Maybe this might be in the same conversation about shared coordinates, or other Revit model coordination issues.

[sbrown]

You didn't lose the ones you place, they are still there just in a diff. phase. rooms and spaces are phase specific, meaning they can live only in ONE phase. So in renovations you must copy rooms and spaces from one phase to the next.

[DaveDH]

That makes sense. Does that mean schedules are phase specific, too? The old spaces don't show up in the space schedule, and space schedules usually show ALL spaces, including ones that have been placed, then deleted in plan view. In the schedule they show up as "Not Placed".

I poked around a bit and I couldn't figure out how to change the phase of a schedule.

It's probably not a big deal, but I'd like to purge out the old spaces just because, and the only way to do that is to delete their rows in the schedule.

[bbeck]

Yes, schedules are/can be phase specific. Right in the properties of the schedule you will see phase and phase filter.