Repeating rooms...best approach?

[FWSchreck]

Hello:

For building types with large numbers of repeating rooms, such as healthcare, corrections, education or hospitality, what is the recommended method for creating rooms that may be inserted/copied multiple times? (By 'rooms', I don't mean the new Revit room object, but a functioning room: a collection of walls, doors, windows, equipment, etc.)

Should the room be a family, a group, or a linked Revit project? What are the advantages of each approach?

[twiceroadsfool]

I personally shy away from using families for things that "should" be made out of system families, such as walls (hence rooms). I prefer the group method, though ive heard that a large number of groups tend to really slow a model down. Right now we use groups for things like a repetitive Cutain Storefront, that is the same everywhere in a retail building. With the group, at least all of the individual items can still retain all of their scheduling data and information.

From what ive read (and i havent delved in that deep yet) the consensus seems to be groups, but leave demising partitions and/or items in the main shell model, not as part of the group. Windows are tough, as they cant be in the group unless their host is (i think). But i imagine youd only group a window if it was in a wall thats also part of the group. i know Groups have drawbacks too... Ceilings in groups havent worked very well for us, although we havent played around with them much... But we put ACT ceilings in, and the grid wouldnt stay alligned properly in the groups, etc.

Hope this helps...

[Justin Marchiel]

we use groups, but they can be buggy. like above don't add hosted objects in a group that host to something outside a group. I also like to break down my groups into a couple of groups (ie a unit would be interior and exterior groups). This seems to help with the amount of time it takes to propegate changes to groups. and make sure items in the group dont need to reference outside the group.

Mirroring them can also lead to problems. if they are built simply to start there might not be any issues, but i find that the erros come job to job

otherwise good luck. hopefully it works well for you.

Justin

[sbrown]

The party walls are NOT part of the Group, The corridor walls are one group and placed on the Core Workset, The interior unit/room walls, doors, etc are placed on a sep group on a "Unit" Workset. This workset will become the one that you DON"T open very often when working on the building. This technique allows you to show the units without the interior partitions on floors you don't need to see them.

Note: Make sure you move the origin of the group to a smart location, ie a grid intersection. Somewhere that if you edit the group it will grow / shrink the way you want. This also helps when placing instances of the group.