Room and Area Help...

[twiceroadsfool]

Allright, so i have a tenant space, that has a restroom in it, and im handing out a landlord work package with it.

Trouble is, i need both *rooms* to maintain their identities for the roof finish schedule, but i want to calculate the area of them together, for the Tag that i put in the floor plan. yes, i know i can use both room tags and just add them together, this is not an acceptable solution unfortunately.

So i figured id use an area plan, so i can wrap the area around the restroom, which works great.

Now heres my issue: I cant place the ROOM tags, in the area plan. I can if i make NEW rooms, but i cant use existing rooms. Is there a reason why? The rooms are already there, and they show up in the other floor plans, just not in the area plan.....

[twiceroadsfool]

Also, on that note... Ive been searching, and i just want to confirm what ive found: That i cant schedule ACROSS between rooms and areas?

Seems to me this would be a great tool. A room existing *in* a certain area, which would allow for a lot of calculations for things like hot spots, mall areas (for scheduling), etc...

Im wanting to split up all these tenant spaces by building, and while i can just make a text parameter *BUILDING* for each room, and put them in the apropriate locale, it would be great if i could draw an area around Building B, and have all the rooms automatically placed in that building...

[twiceroadsfool]

Bump to the top, just in case anyone that knows didnt see the post.

In case someone has another way to go about it, heres what im trying to accomplish:

I have two Rooms: Tenant Space, and Tenant Restroom.

I need them to stay separate, for room finish schedules. But id like to have them in one *area*, so that i can tag it with a live tag, that calculates the total area. Thus far, i have no way to do it.

It would also be useful, as were going to schedule tenant spaces, date of completion, size, building, etc... I can do that anyway, it just means all the restrooms are divorced, so to speak... Thoughts?

[rkitect]

TRF,

I'm looking for a way to do this. Currently I have a tenant room with a restroom and made the tenant's room tag with the total area (including restroom) by making the restroom walls non bounding. I haven't played with making the restroom tag as it's own seperate room, but may tackle that tomorrow when I make the enlarged room plans.

My first strategy is going to be drawing in the Room Seperation lines for the restroom and seeing how the overall room reacts to that... wish me luck. Or let me know how it goes if you try that before I get back on tomorrow/tonight.

GL

[twiceroadsfool]

If you make the walls non bounding, and then put in room bounding lines, its going to be just like the walls were bounding again... been there, tried that.

For now, im giving up. Im going to do one of two things that **** me off... Make the walls not bounding, and drag a room tag over the bathroom, even though its *room* technically wont be there... (This is fine, i just wont get an Area calc...), or ill leave it bounding and just have to dummy the Area calc in the Room Tag... (sigh...)

As an aside, im baffled by the Rooms that you can put in the area plan, but the existing rooms dont show up. So id be fine to use an area plan, if i had it originally, and PUT the rooms in there.... Ugh...

[twiceroadsfool]

Okay, well ive made the bathroom walls non bounding, and that seems to have cured the first problem. Now the second problem:

I have no way to really control where the room boundaries go. Im gusesing it wont be possible to tailor this to our liking, with the CL of demise walls and the EXT of walls dividing tenants and public spaces.

Is my only course of action here to turn off all the walls bounding properties and put room boundary lines everywhere? (eeeeek)

[Scott D Davis]

I'm confused....are you using an Area Plan or a Floor Plan? Area plans are completely different. Just like Rooms to Floor Plans, Area Plans in 9.0 have a defined Area object, that can be tagged. The Area Plan uses Area Boundary lines to separate the different spaces. You can let Revit define the Area Boundary lines, or you can draw them yourself. An Area Plan does not display Room information, but you can define the Areas to mimic the room names.

Maybe you can post a screen shot of what you are working on?

[cphubb]

I am going to agree with Scott. If you are doing area plans for your landlord or tenant improvements etc you should do area plans and segregate the areas into their proper categories, while using the room tags for your construction documents.

Now knowing how landlords can be they often want the information on 1 plan but this is how Revit reconciles the data, and area plans have the ability to do things which floor plans do not.

[D_Driver]

open project
go to room and area tools in design bar
click settings tool
click area schemes, new, name this one to tenant
click area plan tool, in NEW AREA PLAN dbox, drop down type and select tenant as the type
do not automatically create lines to exterior walls (or do, not the issue here)
Draw area boundaries at tenant divisions and around exterior walls as needed
Pick Area Tool, pick areas in drawing area = tenant spaces

add room separations for any tenant areas not defined by walls (some grey boxes or early development might not have walls defined yet)

pick room tool, pick in bathroom, then in main space

Voila, bobs your uncle, tada...

room tags show room areas,
area tags show tenant spaces....

keep in mind out of the box, rooms will go to interior side of walls (room tags report net area), but area will go to area bound lines, so the room areas (sf) will not add up to area tags reported areas...

[twiceroadsfool]

Guys-

I apologize for not being clear. You know how it is when youre thinking about stuff...

Attached is a shot of our Tenant Space Floor Plan. You can see the restroom in the bottom corner. (Dont mind the rediculous sheet names... Until we can duplicate sheets in a model, lol...)

So, heres what i need:

The bathroom is tagged with a room tag, as is the tenant space. They have to be tagged like this, for a room finish schedule on the next page. Now, that area *tag* thats under the Main Room Name. Currently thats dumb text. I have a room tag that displays area, but it subtracts the bathroom because thats a different *room*. Thats unacceptable, for now. Plus, with rooms, i cant adjust the area to reach out to the megenta lease line (cl of some walls, back face of others).

I *can* control those things with areas, thats why i was mixing the two. Each of these Floor plans is a callout from a comprehensive. Soo, if i have to use areas to get a live, accurate SF count, then i was going to make them area plans. I can put Rooms in area plans, with room tags, but i have to define NEW rooms, evidently the rooms in the Floor plans dont count. Not to mention, the area plans dont behave as well...

So i need the rooms tagged separately, but need their areas calculated like they do in an area plan.

Im pretty out of luck, yes? Im a live information nazi, and i hate dumb text in my Revit models, lol...

[Scott D Davis]

how about overlaying the 2 plans on the sheet? Create the floor plan with room tags that shows what you want. Create the area plan that shows what you want. Drag and drop both ono a sheet at the same scale. Turn stuff off in one of the views to not have too much duplicate information, such as walls. The two plans will snap to each other, and all the info you need will be displayed.

[twiceroadsfool]

Hmm... Hadnt thought of that. Might give it a try. Only thing im worried about now is having twice as many plans... Floor plans AND area plans...

It kills me that i can use a room boundary line to disect a rooms boundary, but i cant use one to extend a rooms boundary, lol...

Im basically trying to hash out if this is easier as a room or an area, because im setting up a bunch of facilities schedules based on rooms... When tenant came in, date drawings were done, Building location, etc...

I think its close the way it is... I guess ill have to live with a workaround until we get a little more relaxed room settings and rules...

[luigi]

Although you already figured it out...you can't do what you are trying to do...(hmm..well, unless you overlap the 2 drawings as Scott suggested... :Oops: )


Having said that, there are some things you can do that would make the process somewhere between "Revit Automatic..no user error" to " Manual...with possible user error"

You can make each tenant a "department" rather than room name. This will allow you to group them (although you grouped them by room number, you may want to have seperate room number for your room schedule)

Then you will create a special schedule that the "user" imputting information will use...not something that you will ever print.

Include in the schedule: Department, and Area

In that Schedule you will add a shared parameter "Total Tenant SF" (or whatever you choose) and place it immediately after "Area". (there is a 2 step process for shared parameters to work properly.....I hope you are familar with them)

Sort the schedule by department and show totals for the department (make sure the "Calculate Totals" in Formatting is turned on for Area just in case you want to "itemize each instance"by room name; it will be easier if you don't have "itemize every instance" on...

Now in the schedule you will have the total SF for each tenant, and all the user needs to do is make sure that number (in the Area for each tenant) goes into the shared parameter "Total Tenant Area" a mindless job if you have 50 tenants...

All you need to do now, if you want to show it graphically, is make the "color fill" sorted by department, and each tenant will have a filled region to graphically show what is included in the area count.

I attached an example for your use...

I hope this system helps you out.


I once did this same thing, I was doing an urban project that used extensive area calculation very similarly...and although not the Revit Automatic process, it was quite smooth...........we had literally hundreds of regions, where multiple properties were part of each region...it worked out for us then...

Let me know if I helped you out...

Sincerely,

[luigi]

oops forgot to add (but is correct in the RVT file I attached) that you need a special room tag for the main tenant....I have a tag showing the department, instead of room name, and the shared parameter "Total Tenant Area" instead of "Area"...

[twiceroadsfool]

Wow. That thing is cool! Thanks for sending that :)

Its still some hard keying, but at least theres a check in place. This is a similar solution to the one someone posted forme when i asked about egress exit calculation tags.

Getting calculated values in to tags is a toughie... Hopefully thatll be doable without a hard key one day.

Thanks a bunch for that example though :)

[luigi]

No problem....

But you know what? I was working in an area plan, and I was thinking about this thread.
I didn't have to add a new room...it recognized the rooms from before, all I needed to do is add a room tag....but the room with the proper information is already in there...



Wow. That thing is cool! Thanks for sending that :)

Its still some hard keying, but at least theres a check in place. This is a similar solution to the one someone posted forme when i asked about egress exit calculation tags.

Getting calculated values in to tags is a toughie... Hopefully thatll be doable without a hard key one day.

Thanks a bunch for that example though :)

[twiceroadsfool]

Interesting. Maybe something is up with the View Depth, and/or the height of those rooms then. Ive tried again and again with room tags, and they didnt show up. However the moment i clikc *Room* it allows me, and doesnt give a warning that rooms are overlapping. I wonder whats up...

Ive left it alone for now, ive invested too much time in it, lol. Youre proposed method works well, and definetely minimizes the amount of hand work, but i still cant control which walls are outside face boundaries, and which are CL's. So for now, ill wait until the factory lets us have more control over room boundaries, and getting calc. values in to tags.............

[Steve_Stafford]

There have been some cases where existing rooms in a file that is upgraded to 9.0 doesn't find all rooms automatically. Usually adjusting the room's upper limit resolves it. Worst case, deleting and recreating the room.

I tend to think of the Area Plans as "tenant Plans" and Room or regular floor plans as rooms within the tenant's leased space.

It does seem a bit of an "oversight" that Rooms are unaware of Areas and vice versa. Perhaps it is merely a legacy issue of the lack of an object to touch as we now have. Perhaps it will be easier to relate these two notions of "space" in the future, hopefully.

In the meantime Luigi's and Scott's approaches will yield the sort of results you need, pick your "poison" either way is pretty automatic. As for "more plans"... that's what they are for, specialized reports of data from your database formatted just how you ordered them :smile:

Now if you do both Scott and Luigi's suggestions you get the best of both. Plans that fully disclose the space data from both points of view and look the way you want...or close...

[twiceroadsfool]

There have been some cases where existing rooms in a file that is upgraded to 9.0 doesn't find all rooms automatically. Usually adjusting the room's upper limit resolves it. Worst case, deleting and recreating the room.

I tend to think of the Area Plans as "tenant Plans" and Room or regular floor plans as rooms within the tenant's leased space.




Got ya. I didnt even think about it being a residual effect, because this is an old 8.1 file. Ill try it with our other model, that is native 9.0, and see if it behaves better.

I was thinking the exact same thign about the area plans vs floor plans, thats why i was trying to mix the two. Glad im not the only one who saw the logic there, lol...

As for rooms knowing their areas, and vice versa... It will just open up the door for another whole layer of data... *hot spots* in malls, location tracking (to a greater extent) when items shift around in buildings, and being able to calculate a wide variety of things. (if in Area 1, value x =...)

Thanks for all the help guys, it gives me something to look for/wish for in a later version of Revit :)