Code Egress Drawings

[kmarquis]

I've attached a portion of our Code Plans from an Autocad Project. As you can see, the exits are tagged and the egress from each room is calculated and totaled on the second line of the Exit Tag. Can anyone think of a fancy way to do this in Revit? I'd love for the egress tag representing the number of people leaving the room to contribute to the total for the exit they've been designated to go to. I haven't played around with this much mostly due to time constraints but I wanted to see if anyone could see this being a possibility.

[damon.sidel]

There's been quite some discussions on egress paths in the recent path. I'm sure a quick search would turn those up. That said, I favor the railing approach. Case Inc. has a nice little plugin (http://www.apps.case-inc.com/content/egress-workaround-send-railing-length-selected-parameter) for railings that makes this a cinch, or if you want something more general (http://www.apps.case-inc.com/content/migrate-parameter-parameter). You can create a railing tag that gives you the length and any other taggable value.

We've used this quite successfully. I create a railing type with a start post that is an arrow head in plan and end post that is a large dot in plan. Then I created the balusters to make the dashes. I put all these railings on an Egress workset which was off by default.

[kmarquis]

Thanks for you help. This is good to know and I'll do some digging around. I'm more concerned with adding up the total number of people than the egress length but I might be able to find something.

[jeffh]

Here is an article at the wikihelp on this subject. does not have everythign in your image but the idea could be modified to get close.

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Revit/enu/Community/Examples/Two_Pick_Family_to_Calculate_Fire_Exit_Distance

[kmarquis]

Thanks Jeff...
This has given me some inspiration. I guess I could make a tag that is a generic model instead of the egress line that would represent the small color coded boxes showing the number of people assigned to leave a room. I can set up some shared parameters for which exit they are intended to go to and get my numbers from a schedule. I was hoping that I could create a system that would automatically add up the number of people assigned to leave a room and represent it in the Exit Tag. A schedule can get me closer than just using a calculator.

[Steve_Stafford]

I've been putting my toe in this subject since 2006 when line based families came out. There are few more options these days if you include the adaptive points and railing approaches. I put a summary of posts that I've written HERE (http://revitoped.blogspot.ca/2012/08/egress-post-summary.html). There are links to the videos of other examples you might want to see.

[kmarquis]

No one seems to have the same question I do about Egress Drawings. If you look at my PDF you see little color coded boxes near all the doors to the rooms and all those numbers need to be added up and contribute to the number of people leaving the corresponding exit. All the responses I'm getting keep trying to help me with Egress Travel Distance. I appreciate all of you but maybe I'm not explaining my issue clearly. Does anyone have this same issue?

[Steve_Stafford]

I saw that, part of the equation is documenting the distances. The information you are reporting is based on the exit you are choosing for a room really. It isn't a simple equation to pull that data and pop a box on the sheet. You could create a parameter that each room holds for which exit it is likely to use and then a summary in a schedule sorted by that would give you something close. Same for occupants. But not in the neat little wrapper you show, sorry. The API could probably be harnessed to help crunch the information and put it back in but that's a whole nuther kettle of fish.

[kmarquis]

Lol....thanks Steve. That's what I thought. Just thought I'd ask. I think getting this info into a schedule to transpose the info onto a tag is probably good enough. I appreciate your help.

[damon.sidel]

I'm more concerned with adding up the total number of people...

Sorry, didn't understand that. That's a trickier one indeed. :)

[Alfredo Medina]

No one seems to have the same question I do about Egress Drawings. If you look at my PDF you see little color coded boxes near all the doors to the rooms and all those numbers need to be added up and contribute to the number of people leaving the corresponding exit. All the responses I'm getting keep trying to help me with Egress Travel Distance. I appreciate all of you but maybe I'm not explaining my issue clearly. Does anyone have this same issue?

If we had the ability to show calculated values in tags, and the ability to get properties from rooms from other type of families, all this that you have shown in your PDF would be easy to do. But, you know, those features are not possible yet.

[damon.sidel]

The API could probably be harnessed to help crunch the information and put it back in but that's a whole nuther kettle of fish.

I think it is another kettle of fish, but that might be the right direction. We need to get a more open flow of add-ins like SketchUp has. The SketchUp community has an incredible wealth of free and cheap scripts/plugins developed by users.

[jcoe]

Because of the tag limitations discussed, I opted to use a schedule. I develop an Area Tabulations Schedule that has all the room names, numbers and areas. I then add fields for SF PER OCCUPANT, OCCUPANT LOAD, FIXED SEATING FILTER (this is a yes/no parameter to address areas such as auditoriums), FIXED SEATING.

The occupancy load is a calculated value with the following formula: if(Fixed Seating Filter, Fixed Seating, (Area / 1 SF) / (SF Per Occupant + 0.49))
I also add a conditional formula to highlight rooms that are over 50 occupants, sense these become areas of assembly.

Before I print I hide the columns I don't need. Looks something like the attached image.

89159

[Steve_Stafford]

...Just thought I'd ask...I've got a sample file posted here (http://www.aecadvantage.com/home/links2) that you can download and reverse engineer, just scroll to the Occupancy Calculation section of the page. It uses what jcoe describes. I posted it here at AUGI in 2005/6 here when I was doing some work with Scott Davis' firm. It includes a Schedule Key for the California occupancy types. You can search the threads here for occupancy, there are quite a few too.

[kmarquis]

I played around with the "Occupants Leaving the Room" issue this morning and apprarently I don't have a good grasp on all the rules. Since the quantity of people leaving the room needs to be scheduled I decided to make a Generic Model which would just be a small rectangle, the same size as our CAD tags, which includes an integer parameter representing the number of people and a Designated Exit. This worked fine and the schedule worked out but I had to create a generic tag that I had to manually tag and center over the rectangle to represent the number on the plan. Not elegant. I wanted to nest a label into the Generic Model family but I had trouble tying the integer to control the label. I also wanted to be able to color code the rectangle somehow to correspond with the Exit but I didn't spend much time on that before giving up. Some of this stuff I know is not possible but learning how forumulas work might help me with some of this.

[Steve_Stafford]

The example file I mentioned associates the information with the room itself and a room tag is used to document. Exiting is usually based on the occupancy type and the area involved so tying it to rooms makes sense, at least a little.

[kmarquis]

I wanted to make this a room tag but most of the time the tag sits outside of the room and I don't want to have the leader.

[Steve_Stafford]

It's always something! "We" are our worst enemy :)

[kmarquis]

I know...I feel like I'm being a real pain but honestly I'm pretty easy. It's the people I work for that are really particular about how this stuff looks and they aren't into changing the graphics according to what a software programs limitations are so I either jump through hoops to make this elegant and still have it look the way it did before or add dummy tags and whip out my calculator and do this the old fashioned way.

What prompted this puzzle I'm trying to solve is that I was just working on Code Plans for a 100,000 sf project in Autocad and I had to color code all the exits with my markers on a hard-copy, color code all the occupants designated to go to that exit and manually count all the people and transpose that information into the Exit Tag. It just got me thinking about making this easier for Revit projects. I got a little closer. I really appreciate your help.