Rooms Not Bound to Walls

[brd]

I've attached a JPEG of a screenshot I took out of Revit, something I didn't think was possible. When I try to place a room inside of four walls, the room does not seem to read the walls. If I click in the enclosed area, it gives me the warning that the area is not enclosed and it just gives me the default little rectangle for the room. I checked every property I could in the wall families, made sure the walls are room bounding, the room properties, height, height offsets, level offsets, everything I could think of, but rooms just don't want to read the enclosed area. Some of the rooms already in the file are reading properly, others aren't as they're just sitting on top of each other. In the screenshot, the halftone walls are from a linked file, so we drew room separation lines to enclose that. I don't think that's the problem though because not even the four walls I drew at the top of the plan are enclosing a room.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this? I'm totally stumped! Thanks in advance for the help.

[Teresa.Martin]

Hi!
I checked out your posted image. The only way I was able to repeat this message was if I was trying to add a room when I was on level two, but the walls actually only went up to level 2. That is to say, I should really be on level one to add the room. You might want to check your view range properties and how tall the walls are (i.e. do they actually extend past the level you are trying to add a room to). You might be able to see the walls, but they may actually be on the level below.
Trying adding the room one level below and see if it works.
Best regards,

[DaveP]

I have seen a similar problem. Drove me nuts for quite a while. I see two possibilities for errors:

1. It looks like the Exterior wall is a curtain wall. Is that Curtain wall, by any chance embedded in, or sitting on top of another wall? Revit doesn't like it much when two walls are right on top of each other. In either case, you might be ab;e to fix it by selecting the Curtain Wall & un-checking the Room Bounding box.

2. That column in the corner might be confusing things. The easiest way to find out if that's the problem is to draw a diagonal Room Separation Line across the corner. Say 7 or eight feet away from the corner and connecting the East/West wall to the North/South wall. If your Room then behaves itself, the problem is either the column (uncheck Room Bounding), or your Curtain Wall doesn't meet properly at the corner.

Good luck

[brd]

The base constraint of the walls is set the same level that I'm drawing on. The height of the walls are set to unconnected and 10' tall. So they're not attached to the floor above. The confusing part of this is that there are plenty of rooms on the plan that are properly enclosed rooms and tagged and everything. It's like a switch was flipped in the software all of a sudden that makes it so any new walls and rooms I create don't work correctly.

Everything shown in halftone in the image is a link, so we've drawn room separation lines around the perimeter. I just don't understand why some walls are enclosed while others are not.

[DaveP]

It's like a switch was flipped in the software all of a sudden that makes it so any new walls and rooms I create don't work correctly.
That's exactly what happened when my Curtain Walls (which were actually ribbon windows) were embedded in the Concrete wall. Turning off Room Bounding for the Curtain Wall fixed that one.

[brd]

Here's another little mystery... this room (exam 156) is a perfectly enclosed room, the tag and boundary is fine, there's been nothing wrong with it since we first drew a while back. I just drew in a room separation line and a wall (shown in red) and neither of them cut the room boundary like they should. Weird huh?

[DaveP]

Phasing, maybe?

[Teresa.Martin]

I was thinking the same thing, but I am not getting that as a result. However, he did mention that some of the files were linked... hmmm...

[brd]

I'm thinking there's a bug or corrupt file or something. It just doesn't make any sense because ANY new wall or room separator I draw doesn't bind a room. Yet SOME of the walls that are there now DO bind a room. What would make the software go so random all of a sudden? That's what makes me think there's a bug or something in the file. I'm about to just dig into the backups and load one of those.

[Teresa.Martin]

I have to admit, I am stumped on this one. Perhaps an UBER user would care to respond?

[DaveP]

Is there a place you could upload the file to so we could look at it?

I love a good challenge.

[tamas]

Rooms have a Level parameter. Room boundaries are computed at a height relative to the level of the room. Look at "Settings->Room and Area Settings" to see at which height walls are cut to produce room bounds.

If it is "At system computed height", it means it is by default 4' above the level of the room. Sometimes this gets reset to 0' in special cases.
You may try to check the "At specified height" to some value to make sure you know at what height the calculations take place.

Compare that with the base and top heights of your walls that are ignored for this room. (Best to do this in an elevation view where you can see the wall and levels.)

Chances are that you will find that the actual room calculation height does not interfere with those walls.

Let us know what you found.

Tamas

[tamas]

Starting in Revit 9.0 we switched room calculations to a more robust way. This practically eliminated the errors caused by overlaps or crossings between walls and/or room separation lines.
You may remember that pre-9.0 rooms really did not like those cases.

Since this change happened under the hood, you may still harbor a feeling that most room problems are caused by some sort of overlap.

Let me assure you, that this is no longer the case. Overlaps or not, rooms should be able to calculate their shapes since 9.0.

Unfortunately some room problems will always remain, but my point is that the cause lies most probably elsewhere.

Tamas

[DaveP]

Starting in Revit 9.0 we switched room calculations to a more robust way. This practically eliminated the errors caused by overlaps or crossings between walls and/or room separation lines.
You may remember that pre-9.0 rooms really did not like those cases.

Since this change happened under the hood, you may still harbor a feeling that most room problems are caused by some sort of overlap.

Let me assure you, that this is no longer the case. Overlaps or not, rooms should be able to calculate their shapes since 9.0.

Unfortunately some room problems will always remain, but my point is that the cause lies most probably elsewhere.

TamasCould very well be. That project I had problems with was in 8. Glad to hear I won't have to deal with THAT again!

[dbaldacchino]

I've attached a JPEG of a screenshot I took out of Revit, something I didn't think was possible. When I try to place a room inside of four walls, the room does not seem to read the walls. If I click in the enclosed area, it gives me the warning that the area is not enclosed and it just gives me the default little rectangle for the room. I checked every property I could in the wall families, made sure the walls are room bounding, the room properties, height, height offsets, level offsets, everything I could think of, but rooms just don't want to read the enclosed area. Some of the rooms already in the file are reading properly, others aren't as they're just sitting on top of each other. In the screenshot, the halftone walls are from a linked file, so we drew room separation lines to enclose that. I don't think that's the problem though because not even the four walls I drew at the top of the plan are enclosing a room.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this? I'm totally stumped! Thanks in advance for the help.From the image you posted, one can tell that you have a lot of problems with overlapping spaces in there (the dark blue color is an indication and so are the continuous X lines going from space to space). I'd visit your Review Warnings dialog first to clear as many warnings as you can, cause I bet you have quite a few room problems going on.

[brd]

We ran out of time to spend on this problem so we bit the bullet and loaded up the tape backup file from a week ago. I figure spending a couple days making up work is easier than having a potentially corrupt file to work with from here on out. One thing that just came to my attention, one person was inserting various drafting views (head, jamb and sill details) from another project that we already know was a corrupt file. Can copy/pasting or insterting views from a corrupt file potentially corrupt your new file?

Also, since we're going back to our tape backup file and not actually solving this mysterious issue, is there a way to make sure this problem doesn't happen again the same as it did the first time? By doing this are we just dangerously hoping that lightning doesn't strike twice?

Thanks for all the help so far, I do appreciate it.

[tamas]

Have you looked at the levels in an elevation view in your "corrupt" file? I speculate that the copy/paste may have brought in new levels for you disturbing the original data somehow.

Tamas

[guy.messick825831]

Quick point - is the "Room Bounding" box checked in the Wall Properties dialog?

[ltudor]

We are experiencing a similar situation.
Rooms which were previously scheduled with area values are now no longer enclosed, and therefore no longer have an area value in the schedules. This goes for all rooms, not just those bounded by curtain walls.

When we try to create new rooms they are not enclosed either.
Tried adjusting view range and adding rooms on proper levels, no help.

We started the file in 9.0.

The room bounding is checked on all walls.

any further insight/info on this?

[tamas]

We are experiencing a similar situation.
Rooms which were previously scheduled with area values are now no longer enclosed, and therefore no longer have an area value in the schedules. This goes for all rooms, not just those bounded by curtain walls.

When we try to create new rooms they are not enclosed either.
Tried adjusting view range and adding rooms on proper levels, no help.

We started the file in 9.0.

The room bounding is checked on all walls.

any further insight/info on this?Have you tried to look at Level settings? (See my replies above).

Tamas

[brd]

We sent our file to Autodesk support and they recommended we do two things to fix the problem, I'm not sure which one it was that actually fixed it though, so I hope this quick summary helps. Autodesk support told us to 1) clear out out the review warnings box (like baldacchino said). We went through all of those one by one, and many of which appeared irrelevant but I have no way of knowing if they really were irrelevant or not We went even further by just deleting out all rooms from the room schedule that were repetitive rooms or not enclosed.

The second suggestion from support was to delete out a particular wall type. Our project has a radiation vault that is solid concrete. The vault is a family we created out of solid extrusions. The wall type in question was simply a furring wall that is a metal stud and one layer of gypsum board that follows the face of the vault walls. It overlapped with room separators in quite a few areas. I deleted the walls from the model (but did not purge them from the file yet) and the rooms started behaving again. To test the theory, I drew another one of the questionable walls and the rooms started acting up once again. So I simply purged out that wall type and recreated it from scratch and we haven't had a problem since. Perhaps there was simply a bug or glitch in that particular wall type, the possibilities are way over my head.

Again, I don't know if one and/or both of those issues were the source of the problem, but following through on both seemed to have solved the problem. I hope this helps.

[tamas]

I just looked at a file probably reported from this thread and the problem is caused by one wall. The bug has been fixed in the upcoming version.

If this is the "Fall City Central" file, all you need to do is open LEVEL 1, select wall 253059 (using Tools->Element Ids->Select by Id) and click on the left blue control.

Sorry for the trouble.

Tamas

[twiceroadsfool]

We had something similiar happen with a Bar Joist family from the imperial library. We had a few hundred joists in Beam Systems in our Existing Building model, and suddenly any view higher than the roof wouldnt open. It would say "An error has occured drawng the contents..." Yadda yadda, 4 hours of research later, there was one corrupt bar joist. I took it out, and the file went back to working normal, lol...

:) <shrug> It happen. :)

[pbyrne]

I just had the same problem and received a fix from Autodesk. It required that I send them a copy of the file and they performed some sort of analysis on it (they were not specific about how they determined what the problem was).

They determined that "the reason the rooms were not working is because there was an opening too close to the end of the wall. Therefore it was necessary to Cut and Paste the wall back into the project. I'm not sure why that would affect all the rooms. However, they also told me it was a problem that has been fixed in the next release."

Specific instructions posted by Autodesk to fix the problem in my file:
Development determined the problem is related to one of the walls (Id #253059) in the project. To fix the problem, follow these steps:

1. Go to Tools>Element Ids>Select by Id
2. Enter the Element Id, 253059, and click OK.
3. Go to Edit>Cut
4. Click OK to ignore the warnings.
5. Go to Edit>Paste Aligned>Same Place

The rooms should now work properly in the project.

That's it.
Pat

[pbyrne]

not sure why my view did not show today's threads before i posted. I was following up on the fall city central file. i posted autodesk's instructions on how to fix the problem - relaying generally the same info as you. just trying to do my part and keep everyone up to speed.

[yuval.yb]

I also have a similar issue. I'm trying to sketch a ceiling, and although it recognizes some rooms for the auto-sketch function, it gets stuck when I click "sketch". The warning is: Room computations only succeeded without considering the following elements. And then it shows me three walls that look perfectly fine. Any ideas?
Thanks.

[tamas]

Yuval,

Please send your file to Revit support. I'd like to look at this problem. It indicates that some internal algorithm could not deal with those walls beacuse of the way they are interacting with each other and other room bounding elements. (walls, room separation lines, etc.)

This is an infrequent event and it usually indicates miniscule misalignments. (Like a wall that is at 0.01 degree off being horizontal or vertical.)

It may be that there is a room separation line on top of (but slightly misaligned) some of those walls.

Tamas