Auditorium techniques

[janunson]

I'm looking at doing a large auditorium in Revit.
Any suggestions for making this easier - thinking things like the floors in the balcony - in place family, or lots of floors? anyone have suggestions?

What about site lines, etc? Does anyone know any parametric tricks to make these work more easily?

Also - has anyone exported to Ecotect for use in sound and illumination modeling? How'd it work?

[PeterJ]

I did a small theatre a couple of years back. I found grouping the seating worked well and using floors for seating levels with thin walls to make the risers then mostly I detailed up the actual make up using drafting lines, which proved at that stage to be the easiest route.

[Andre Baros]

We've done some raised seating with solids (because that was the easiest) and some with floors. Using floors makes seating easier because the chairs stick to the floor. The seating is the biggest part. I tried setting up parametric families for that, but it got cumbersome to keep going back to the family to change things so we ended up with lots of arrays. Don't array an array, it gets ugly, and definitely take advantage of a seat component that mixes 2d and 3d to optimize for different views, detail levels, etc.