Copy Monitor Rooms in 2009

[DBowkett]

I've tried everything possible but I have had not luck copy/monitoring rooms in revit 2009. That is creating a file in arch 2009 and then trying to link it into MEP 2009, then trying to copymonitor rooms. I've tried different opion interns on room volume calculations, level line volume calc heights, phasing, etc...

If someone has any idea why this isn't working in 2009 please let me know,

Cheers

[Dwane Lindsey]

You can no longer Copy/Monitor rooms in MEP 2009. What you want to look into is the new Spaces feature.

Kyle Bernhardt's blog - http://inside-the-system.typepad.com/my_weblog/ - has some great videos and explainations on the new Spaces.

[DaveP]

You can no longer Copy/Monitor rooms in MEP 2009. .

That's disappointing to hear. I was hoping they were going to add it to RAC, not remove it from MEP.

We often use an Equipment Consultant (not in-house). They need to place their Equipment in a Room, but even with the improvements in Linking, they still can't see out Rooms. At the moment, we're using a very fragile, time-consuming process whereby we check out Worksets under their name, then send them our Central file. They work on that file as if it was a Local Copy (hoping that we've checked everything out) and then send it back to us. We set our User Name back to them and STC, then we check it all out again & lather, rinse, repeat again.

If the consultant could just C/M our Rooms, they could have their own model & we could Link in each other's:cry:

[kyle.bernhardt]

They need to place their Equipment in a Room, but even with the improvements in Linking, they still can't see our Rooms.

This seems to be the root cause of the in-depth workaround you are currently employing. This is certainly something that should be working just fine. I have a question.

What do you define as "seeing your rooms"? Do you mean the physical extents? Your Room Tags?As an element in the Linked Model, there are ways to control the visibility in the Host model, Rooms included. There are also workflows that will allow you to get consistent views between Arch and MEP projects.

I guess if I better understood what you were trying to accomplish, I could better provide a solution, but thus far I haven't seen anything that I would call a use case for Copy/Monitoring Rooms.

Cheers,
Kyle B

[DBowkett]

Thank you for the information, I'll play around with spaces to see how they work.

Cheers

[DBowkett]

I've tried out these Spaces and it seams to me that this feature duplicates the work for anyone working on an integrated Project. Architects put the rooms into their project, and then Engineers link in that project and create space which infact duplicate the work the architect did previously.

I can see why they've done this, but I would suggest if rooms are available in a linked model that they shoul db able to be copy/monitored to make the process truly shared BIM information.

Cheers

[Steve_Stafford]

I agree...there should be a way to acquire spaces by selecting rooms or something. It is undesireable rework to simply create spaces from a great many rooms. Spaces provide a great way to deal with the volume of space that isn't a "room" nicely. It is really just the rework that is unpleasant. The fact that zones and spaces are aware of each other is also something that we've always wanted from rooms and Areas in RAC...well...I've always wanted :smile:.

[DaveP]

I've attached a simple example of our problem.
The project called Walls represents the Architectural model.
The project called Equip represents our Equipment consultant (who is not in-house)
Equip links in Walls to get an Architectural background.

Problem #1:
Our Equipment consultant wants to generate a schedule of the equipment they are inserting. However, even though they may be able to see the Rooms in the Walls model, they cannot use those rooms in a schedule (See the Furniture Schedule)

Problem #2:
The Equipment consultant has Wall (or Ceiling)-hosted families. They cannot place their equipment on our Walls. I inserted an Upper Cabinet as an example. I can host it on the wall in the center, which I drew in the Equip model, but the cabinet cannot be hosted by one of the walls in the Walls model.

If we were both in the firm, we could share the model & things would work fine. However, if the Architect and the Equipment consultant are in different firms, we need to use different models and link them into each other. As evidenced by the new features in 2009, (which are great) Revit seems to be going the route of using Links more. We will need to be able to access more information within those links.

[james.klatt]

So just to clarify to make sure I understand this correctly. Arch has rooms and room tags in their model if I link in their model I now have to create spaces and space tags instead of copy/monitoring their rooms like before? I then have no way of pulling in room names or numbers from the arch model? So if the arch changes room names and numbers is there anyway to auto-update or will I have to manually correct every change?

[Steve_Stafford]

Yes, rooms are rooms and spaces are spaces...separate elements. Spaces are aware of rooms and a tag can be configured to display the room name and number instead but the spaces remain arbitrarily number/named. This will likely lead to confusion if using the heating and cooling loads tool or exporting to gbxml.

We need to be able to tell Revit to match space names and numbers to their room names and numbers as well as let us know if they have changed.

[wblaney]

it would also be nice if we could keep spaces in design options, too. Right now, I can't use design options to have revit run different lighting calc scenarios because if the rooms change from option to option, the spaces can't work with it.