Curtain Wall Family as Room Bounding Element

[Dimitri Harvalias]

I have a tower project where the curtain system has been modeled as a family outside the project and then inserted and copied/arrayed into the building model.
Curtain systems and walls created in a project can act as room bounding elements and room objects will report areas for spaces having these walls as boundaries.
The external family will not register as a room bounding element so I'm looking for a solution to this problem.
Rather than place room separation lines at all my curtain wall locations the only workaround I've come up with is to change the family category to column and assign a sub-category to it so i can control visibility better. In R9 columns can now act as room bounding elements so this works great.
I'd rather see the curtain system not categorized as a column so anyone else have and great ideas?

[Steve_Stafford]

Could you build the curtain wall system as panels and place them into a simpler curtain wall system in the project? Also, you could insert the separate family in an in-place wall family which should allow it to be treated as room bounding?

[Dimitri Harvalias]

Both good suggestions Steve. The main resaon for doing this is to try to avoid using groups for the repeated curtain wall elements. I figure (and in house comments seem to verify) that doing it this way can keep the model more lightweight. No hard evidence but the other users seem happy.

Simpler panels: the curtain system is along a curve so that won't work too well. For a straight wall that would be ideal. One large panel with the infill being the remainder of the curtain system. I'll have to rememer that one for next time.

Nesting into a wall: because of the curve there are similar issues to part 1 but could work. I'll give it a try and see what happens.
Thanks