Space Planning Revit - Easier in AA 2010.?

[andy.wiggins]

I have trawled thru the posts, and cannot seem to find an answer to my specific question.

In AA 2010, I can throw out space diagrams, un constrained to anything, and position them like coloured squares of card board. This is how we like to work on large briefs. We get an overall area schedule, break it down into faculties, then individual rooms. Just like card board cut outs. I can schedule them, perform area checks etc.

This is all the detail we need at an early stage. I can then add walls etc and build the design from there.

Revit seems to be very different in this dept. I dont want anyone to spoon feed me, but it appears the only way to do something like the above inside of Revit, is to use Mass objects. I want to be able to schedule each individual room, so it appears in the schedule, with its area, and perform queries on those areas. Is there a tutorial or something similar to how this works.?

We are currently looking at moving across to Revit from AA 2010, and have been extoling the virtues of a switch. Problem is, the first thing we will do on our new project in Revit is.. switch back to AA 2010 to get the spaces to work.. Seems like a poor start..!

Cheers in advance..

[eric.piotrowicz]

Haven't had a chance to test out this idea but it seems to me that you could do what you are asking by sketching your spaces with room separation lines and then define the room names, numbers, use, etc. A generic wall type would also accomplish this and it would give you some 3D representation of the volume of the room so instead of just cardboard squares you would have cubes. Either way would let you schedule and analyze the rooms and areas easily.

[patricks]

You could also create an Area Plan type for space planning and use area separation lines and area objects, and create an area schedule.

I believe you can also create areas or rooms directly in a schedule, and also create a field for target program area. The rooms or areas will be unplaced until you place them in a drawing. I went to a seminar about space planning done this way, but our firm doesn't really do this so I didn't pay very close attention.

*edit* I would use the rooms with room separation lines option, because then you can also create color fill plans and assign departments to your different rooms so the rooms will show up with various color fills. Should be quite easy to do in Revit.

[andy.wiggins]

Cheers Guys..

Will have a look and see what I can come up with.

Im just past the stage in Revit of "oh look how easy it is" and " its better than AA 2010 at this.."

I have now entered the "Right, I could always do it like this in AA 2010.. whats Revits version...."

Cheers

[brethomp]

Andy,

Attached is the solution that I use. It's a template that contains a bunch of "space" objects that are really just generic model families, with a bunch of instance parameters. They can be stretched and moved on the screen very easily to layout your spaces. They have all of the scheduling ability that you state above. I only included a couple of shapes, we have a big library of different shapes that can be loaded.

The template is a bit of a dead end street, since I purged out all the stuff you would need for a real building, but it is a fast way to study plan layouts, if you design that way.

[matt_dillon]

If you don't mind considering a 3rd party solution, Trelligence Affinity is an excellent space planning tool that also includes some really nice programming functionality. It's actually a stand-alone application, but it links bi-directionally with Revit Architecture.

It may be a bit overkill for what you're wanting to do, but you can get more info at www.trelligence.com.

I have trawled thru the posts, and cannot seem to find an answer to my specific question.

In AA 2010, I can throw out space diagrams, un constrained to anything, and position them like coloured squares of card board. This is how we like to work on large briefs. We get an overall area schedule, break it down into faculties, then individual rooms. Just like card board cut outs. I can schedule them, perform area checks etc.

This is all the detail we need at an early stage. I can then add walls etc and build the design from there.

Revit seems to be very different in this dept. I dont want anyone to spoon feed me, but it appears the only way to do something like the above inside of Revit, is to use Mass objects. I want to be able to schedule each individual room, so it appears in the schedule, with its area, and perform queries on those areas. Is there a tutorial or something similar to how this works.?

We are currently looking at moving across to Revit from AA 2010, and have been extoling the virtues of a switch. Problem is, the first thing we will do on our new project in Revit is.. switch back to AA 2010 to get the spaces to work.. Seems like a poor start..!

Cheers in advance..

[cliff collins]

I agree with the other posts:

1. Room Separation Lines
2. Generic model families
3. Trelligence Affinity for Revit ( the best way )

cheers.....

[rhilbert]

Our office tried Trellignece Affinity, but gave up on it in early 2010 because we found it to be too buggy to roll out to our space planners. The spaces it created were not very accurate so all spaces had to be manually resized once imported. And the presentation graphics were 72 dpi, which is unusable for client presentation purposes.

I felt that it was still in beta. I always felt it had amazing potential. And the owner/prgrammer was great to work with to resolve issues quickly. But that those hiccups can't be tolerated witht eh pace and scale of most of our projects. Has it improved since we stopped using it? THose of you who give it a thumbs up, have you expereinced similar issues?

I always hoped Autodesk would buy them, debug them, and offer it as a Revit add-on. I'll put that on the wishlist.

[DaveP]

Oh, to have a good Space Planning tool in Revit! Then I could finally get our Medical Planners to give up AutoCAD.
The basic problem Revit has with Space Planning is that Revit doesn't really have an object with boundaries that makes a Room. There IS a Room object, but it's boundaries are determined by the Walls (and RS lines) that it bumps into. So you can't just say "This Room is 12' x 18' and should STAY 12 x 18. The Room will change if it's bounding Walls move. Works great for CDs, but not so much for Programming and Schematics.

[Scott D Davis]

Oh, to have a good Space Planning tool in Revit! Then I could finally get our Medical Planners to give up AutoCAD.
The basic problem Revit has with Space Planning is that Revit doesn't really have an object with boundaries that makes a Room. There IS a Room object, but it's boundaries are determined by the Walls (and RS lines) that it bumps into. So you can't just say "This Room is 12' x 18' and should STAY 12 x 18. The Room will change if it's bounding Walls move. Works great for CDs, but not so much for Programming and Schematics.

Thats what Massing is for...make masses to the sizes/shapes of your rooms. they report area, surface area, volume, and more. Later, then can have walls/roofs/floors/etc applied to them to make the building. If the Masses change, the objects "glued" to them can be updated.

You can even make intelligent masses that can be "set" to an Area and when you strectch them in one direction, the other dimension changes accordingly to keep the area the correct value.