Displaying room separation within wall

[bc_lee7]

Anybody can show me how to display the room separation line within the wall. In normal circumstances, the wall will cover the room separation line. I would like to display the room separation line so that I can manipulate them to get room area displayed as area upto wall centre rather than the interior of wall.

[david.kingham]

In 8.1 you will be able to get room areas from the wall centers without using room seperation lines!

[rob.goetze]

The area analysis tools, which have been in Revit Building for several versions, already provide the ability to get rooms areas up to the wall centre.

After creating an area plan, you put in area boundaries. Note that on the options bar, you can choose to use the area rules -- related to Building Owners Management Association requirements -- or to manually define your own boundaries.

The area tag will ignore the actual walls and instead will show room areas to the area boundaries.

[kpaxton]

The area analysis tools, which have been in Revit Building for several versions, already provide the ability to get rooms areas up to the wall centre.

After creating an area plan, you put in area boundaries. Note that on the options bar, you can choose to use the area rules -- related to Building Owners Management Association requirements -- or to manually define your own boundaries.

The area tag will ignore the actual walls and instead will show room areas to the area boundaries.
Exactly Rob! I use this all the time after creating the plan to a certain level of detail to help me stay on track with the Client's desires for unit sizes, etc. The nice thing is once created, it's easy to manipulate and keep track of. And the best part.... it SCHEDULES !! All the mediocreness of doing calc's are gone!

I have found that, at least for me, that although the area tool allows you to 'select all the walls automatically, that it invariably selects certain things in a wrong manner. I typically will draw my own lines by hand (with the chain box checked), then align the lines where I need them. To me, It's worth the extra 5 minutes it takes. ;)

Not to mention that you can make cool color-coded diagrams for later printing to show your client what goes where - IF you need.

[D_Driver]

Area analysis tools are the best...
create a new area rule called "occupancy"
make a new schedule
set up occupancy ratio
then set up the schedule to do your occupancy calcs

put a color fill on it
then set the scale to 1/32 and drop each floor onto your code sheet! sweet

this is one of my favorite overlooked tools of revit 8-)

[carloscbvieira]

D-Driver, can you explain better how you set up de occupancy ratio? This sounds good! :)

[D_Driver]

use the menu settings>area settings
make a new area scheme called OCCUPANCY

once you make a new scheme you can use it for all kinds of things. You can think of it like having another room schedule/tag object and a plan set that goes with it.

once you have created a scheme, open the area analysis tools and generate an area plan.

In the New area plan dbox you will see the top drop down now includes the area plan type "OCCUPANCY"
Go ahead and generate a plan for each floor of the building but do NOT generate lines automatically. (it will prompt you for this)

draw the lines/boundaries how you wish to divide up the floors - whether by occupancy group (A1, S2, B, M, etc for a fire wall separation plan) or by occupancy use for occupancy load calcs.

As you are drawing lines you can choose to "apply area rules" (options bar) or not
if you are doing a specialized plan as above you probably want to uncheck this except...
Note: you have to watch curtain walls and columns (both wraps and structural)
curtain walls for some reason if you uncheck "apply area rules" do not like the pick option - I cannot get it to pick the curtain wall, only a system panel, even tabbing through the selection choices.
also, there is some odd behavior.:screwy:..sometimes if you mix drawn lines and picked lines it will not close the loop - even though it appears closed and all the lines are cleaned up. if this happens, try erasing some of the lines and re drawing them. if this still does not work, (area flows into adjacent area) try drawing a rectangle inside the area you want, tag it and then delete the rectangle you just drew. for some reason the area will then flood the new perimeter and establish a valid boundary (go figure), but I digress...

tag the areas
now create a schedule.
when you create a schedule you will see "areas(OCCUPANCY)" as one of the categories

add level, name and area - these are standard parameters
you will have to add a couple parameters
create new parameters:
OCCUPANCY (text)
OCCUPANCY RATIO (integer)
add calculated parameter OCCUPANTS
enter
(Area * 1 / 1' ^ 2) * (1 / OCCUPANCY RATIO)
for the formula

voila!, or if you are in Canada, Bob's your Uncle:wink:

[carloscbvieira]

Good one thanks the problem is that in Portugal we dont use inches so for 13m2 of area and a ocupancy ratio of 5, I have 703.93.... Occupants in there :o :o

I must see the formula more carefull to understand the maths you do!! ( I´m divorced with math a couple of years) :)

[D_Driver]

The most important thing any time your are working with formulas it to understand the units of the parameter types you are working with. If you are using mixed parameter types, you will be working with mixed units and need to do some converting.
For example:
converting an area to a number for whatever reason (wall area takeoffs, etc) you need to convert the square area (square feet, square meter, whatever) to a number


doing costing per Sq Meter might be easier to understand
if you create a parameter CostPerSM and this parameter type you set to be a Number
then create a calculated parameter TotalFloorCost also a number
if the floor costs $1,500 per Square Meter.
to get total cost I would (SM) x $1500/Square Meters or the formula
((Area) * (costPerSM))
in this case it looks like I end up with $ because the square meters on the top cancels the square meters on the bottom.
However, all Revit knows about CostPerSM is that it is a number - there are no units associated with it, so really at this point Revit sees the parameter TotalFloorCost (a number type parameter) coming up with a value with Sq Meter units. It chokes and gives up the "inconsistent units" message


I cannot simply write out square meters or abbreviate it SM, but I can substitute 1M^2
the ^ is the mathematical sign to "raise to the power of", so now the formula becomes
((Area) * (costPerSM)) / 1M^2
the 1M^2 just cancels out the units an makes the calculated value just a unit-less number and Revit is happy once again.

so back to the original equation
(Area * 1 / 1' ^ 2) * (1 / OCCUPANCY RATIO)
the imperial version of the meter squared thing is 1/1'^2.
I just put it up front to take the Square feet off the Area - it really can go anywhere in the formula
while yes the occupancy ratio is theoretically #people/SF, so you think the SF would just cancel out, and they would if I set the parameters up a bit differently.
As above, the parameter OCCUPANCY RATIO was set up as just a number or integer - as such it does not have any units associated with it. even though in my brain I am thinking of this as #people/SF, because the parameter is a number type of parameter, it has no units associated with it, so I need to apply the unit conversion to cancel out the SF from the area value.

in a different scenario, I actually set up the parameter OCCUPANCY RATIO to be an Area type of parameter.
For me an office area has a ratio of 100 SF/person, so the parameter OCCUPANCY RATIO is an area type of parameter. If I put a value 100 in there, it would show up in the schedule as 100 SF
then the calculated value would need to be just
(Area / OCCUPANCY RATIO) because both of the parameters are consistent units I do not need the 1/SquareUnits conversion

clear as mud?

[carloscbvieira]

No!

Now it was like water! Thanks very useful ;)

[Batman]

One good thing about ADT is that it can do hierarchy area summaries. Is it possible to do the same type of reporting with Revit?

[beegee]

You can schedule, group and filter by department or other user defined criteria - is that what you mean ?

[Batman]

Basically, as long as you can allocate areas under a group subdivision and then be able to group that subdivision under further divisions. In ADT you can create these hierarchal trees and allocate the area to which ever division it belongs to.

The reporting is then flexible in delivering whatever variation a user would require. Any Division would report its total area plus any total areas in its infant levels.

It seems as though Revit has only one level. Is this right?

Edit : What I should say is that Revit does not seem to have the area linking ability. That you need to create the fields for the different divisions and if a change is required modify all of those fields if the area was allocated differently.

[beegee]

Something like this ?

[Batman]

Yes, it seems as though you can produce area reports with the hierarchy, to a maximum of 4 levels, which is probably adequate.

What I would really like to see is if Revit areas have the ability to cascade the data. So when I create a field for group and division and I select a group (say group is the parent level and division the infant) only the divisions relevant to that group are available rather than all the divisions across the file for all groups. Some sort of filter selection method.

Otherwise by relying on a manual process it could work.

Thanks BG.