ARCHIBUS Smart Client Extension for Revit

Using Area Elements to Model Rooms - Process Overview

Drawing Room Areas - Depending on how your model is drawn, you may find you are using an inordinate number of room-separation lines to achieve the correct boundary for your Room elements. Depending on how your exterior walls, structural walls, interior walls, and columns were created, you may or may not be able to achieve your desired boundary results. Also, even if the elements were created correctly, you may have to change walls of one type to another to make the automatic Room boundaries work the way you intend.

An alternative is to simply draw area elements to represent each of your rooms. Since the Area Boundary Line features snap to underlying wall faces or centerlines, the process is faster than you might think, and often easier than trying to understand how changing one wall type will affect all instances of the wall throughout the model.

For a comparison of using rooms vs. using areas in Revit, see Standards of Area Accuracy.

To draw area elements to represent each of your rooms:

  1. Create an Area Scheme. Use the Area Schemes tab of the Home / Room / Area and Volume Computations dialog to create a new scheme for Room Areas.

  2. Create an Area Plan. Use the Revit Home/Areas/Area Plan command to create an area plan. Select "Room Areas" as the plan type, and answer No to create a boundary for your interior gross area.
  3. Draw Rooms. Use the Revit Home/Areas/Area Boundary Line command and select walls to create area boundaries around each of your walls.

    You can also use the Revit Home/Areas/Area Boundary Line mode, but select the line tool from the Draw menu that appears. Snap to the wall face (for structural walls) or wall centerline (for interior walls) as your space standard dictates.

  4. Create Room Areas. Invoke the Home / Area / Area command and click within the internal gross area to create it. If you cannot click within the boundary and create an area, check that the area boundary is closed.
  5. Adjust Area Types. If the model marks structural, external, and internal walls, select the area and use the Area Type to adjust its boundaries to include or exclude portions of the wall, depending on which type of area it represents.

  6. Set Asset Type. Since Revit areas can map to multiple ARCHIBUS Asset Types. Select "Rooms" from the ARCHIBUS Asset Type drop-down list . Doing so instructs the ARCHIBUS commands to connect any areas to the “Rooms” table rather than to the Rooms table.

  7. Number and Edit Data. Use the ARCHIBUS Number and Edit Data command to edit the rooms as you would for Room elements. The Building and Floor Code will default to the proper values for the level.
  8. Publish Enterprise Graphics. If you like, use the Publish Enterprise Graphics command to update the graphics index of your Revit model. The commands will publish both the room and gross area graphics.

You can use both Room and Area elements to represent rooms, vertical penetrations, and service areas in the same ARCHIBUS project. This is useful when you are supplied one Revit model drawn using the first techniqu,e and another model drawing with the second technique. (You can also mix Room and Area elements in the same model, although that is not a best practice.)

Revit Notes - Area Tags

By default, the Revit Area tag shows just the Area name and the area value. You can change the parameters that show in the Area tag to include other parameters by editing the Area Tag family. Edit the Area Tag. rfa in the Libraries \ US Imperial \ Annotations, or the Libraries \ Metric \ Annotation folder. Then use the Insert \ Load Family command to replace the default area tag within your model.

In this way, you can display other parameters in the Area Tag -- such as the Room Code, Room Category, Room Type and other data. Even for database-driven values, the ARCHIBUS Extension for Revit always updates the Revit parameter value to match, so you can use the usual Revit features to display these values.