Link exit door to room area

[MikeJarosz]

I'm looking into using Revit for egress calculations. I can determine what room a door is in using the to/from in available fields. However, the list of available fields for rooms conspicuously omits the room area. What it does have is other calculated properties like volume and unbounded height. Why would Revit leave out area, probably the most useful property of a room?

I tried dividing the volume by the height using a calculated field and got correct area numbers when I manually compared them to the room schedule, which can report areas, but I don't trust it. My sample project has simple rooms with flat ceilings. I suspect irregular volume conditions such as shed roofs rather than flat ceilings will produce an incorrect area using my simple division formula.

I realize I could take the reports out of Revit into Excel or even Access and do relational lookups between separate tables, but what I want is a method I can include in the Revit template.

Any bright ideas how I can get the area of a room associated with a specific exit door in native Revit? Is there an Autodesk clairvoyant who can explain why area was left out of the available fields but volume included?

[gbrowne]

Mike, I may be misunderstanding you, but in room schedules, room area is the first available option?

I re-read. I am misunderstanding you. You want to know room area in a door schedule. I can't see that happening. Could you do two schedules side by side? Clunky, I know...

[Steve_Stafford]

At this point you'll need to use the API to connect the dots and store values that will need to be refreshed prior to submission, printing etc.

[MikeJarosz]

At this point you'll need to use the API to connect the dots and store values that will need to be refreshed prior to submission, printing etc.

I am aware that the API is an option, and I have worked with the Revit API before, but I'm not sure API customization is appropriate to this particular office. I would be the only one in the firm who understood it, and my C# is veerrryyyy rusty.

I have the Revit app to dump Revit data into Access and it's working. I could easily do a relational query between the door table and the room table, but again, I would be the only one in the office who understands it. AND, as far as I know, I have the only copy of Access. I could then create an image of the report and insert it onto a sheet.

All this is for an egress/code analysis template I'm working on. I used your line based family (LBF) for the egress path and it's working well. One of my colleagues threw me a curve ball: what if the egress path has to go down a stair? Can the LBF be sloped? I haven't tried that yet. I know egress paths have been done using railings, which of course can follow a stair, but I chose the LBF because of its simplicity. Any thoughts?

No one has addressed the glaring omission of room area from the available fields. I cannot see how volume can be included but area not. They are so close in concept. What would allow one and prohibit the other? THAT would be connecting the dots, and would open up a whole chapter in Revit schedules......

[Steve_Stafford]

I'm pretty sure that David Baldachinno shared a version of the egress family that goes down stairs in an earlier post here at AUGI in response to that question. The line based family approach needs a version that provides a vertical offset to allow for the slope of the stair runs.

The omission you refer to... Revit has numerous such little oversight. They usually respond with, "Why would you want that, can you give us some use cases?" Unfortunately at this point it's like your parents telling you "because, I said so". You're not going to get what you want and you're not going to get a good reason other than that's the way it is. :(

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Have you tried looking at embedded schedules? Create a room schedule to show your areas and include doors into and exiting from those rooms. You still won't be able to push values from one category to another but you should be able to format the schedule in a way that allows you to put the door width and a calculated value side by side for easier comparison.

[Steve_Stafford]

Embedded Schedules generally get a response like ew... that looks terrible... and they don't get used after that. :(

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Couldn't agree more, but if it's just for internal QA/QC Mike may be willing to suffer for his art :lol:

[MikeJarosz]

While I'm working in a program, I watch the menus and windows. When I see a function or a feature I don't know about, I make a note to investigate it when I have the time. One day I saw embedded schedules and I thought to myself "what's that about?". So I checked it out. and..............


ew... that looks terrible...

It's not that the embedded concept is bad, it's the rigid format: a double line header and double line record make it impossible to read.

Back to the area issue. We all know that life safety/egress plans are for submission to governing agencies, and that is at the heart of my need to link doors and areas. The bureaucratic nature of plan examiners requires that the plans appear precisely the way they want them or you get kicked out of their office. Recall a few weeks back there was a discussion in this forum about rounding errors and apparently incorrect totals. One participant was particularly upset that a $7G program like Revit couldn't get the arithmetic right. I suspect that he was preparing documents for submission to the building department, and they are notorious for black and white interpretation of the rules. .01 SF over or under and you're out of the game.

I know for a fact that the NYC Building department checks addition. Years ago I wrote a VBA macro to add feet and fractional inches in Excel for our city planning department after they became tired of resubmitting plans because the addition was wrong. Same with fractional angles vs degrees minutes seconds.

[damon.sidel]

I used your line based family (LBF) for the egress path and it's working well. One of my colleagues threw me a curve ball: what if the egress path has to go down a stair?

Mike, have you considered using an adaptive component?
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?138757-Length-of-a-segmented-line&p=1169122&viewfull=1#post1169122 among other posts about it here and on the web. It can go down stairs and it can be tagged in total rather than each segment like the line method.

Still doesn't help with your door-room situation, though...

[DaveP]

Years ago I wrote a VBA macro to add feet and fractional inches in Excel

That still blows me away that you can't use a native Excel format to display feet an inches.
What? Did they code Excel in some country where they don't need to mess to a stupid system like we backwards Americans use?

[MikeJarosz]

That still blows me away that you can't use a native Excel format to display feet an inches.


I also wrote an Excel macro to convert decimal degrees to degrees, minutes and seconds and then add them. Is that a stupid system? I have worked a lot in the metric system. It can be used stupidly too. A project in Brazil used one meter as the basic unit, whereas most of the world uses the millimeter. So millwork dimensions were all decimal fractions. Reveals were .006 thicknesses .003 and so on. Then again, if you base dimensions on the millimeter, you get dimensions like 153,428.07. Have you seen steel section moduli in metric? Big numbers. Must be strong!

You should read "The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World" by Ken Alder. It's about the mistakes built into the metric system.