15: Creating Rooms and Area Plans


CHAPTER 15
Creating Rooms and Area Plans


This chapter brings you to a great point in Revit. You’re in a position where you can begin to build on what you’ve added to your model up to this point. By creating rooms and areas, you’re starting to merge the model with the database. In Chapter 11, “Schedules and Tags,” you did the same thing; but by adding rooms and areas, you physically build your construction documents while at the same time adding crucial information to the model’s database. In this chapter, here is what we are going to learn:



  • Creating rooms
  • Adding a room schedule
  • Adding a color fill plan
  • Adding room separators
  • Creating an area plan

Creating Rooms


The first topic we’ll tackle is the task of creating a room and adding it to the model. The procedures that follow will focus on finding where to launch the room and areas, and the parameters Revit looks for while placing a room into the floor plan.


Because Revit draws from a database to gather information, the process of creating a room boils down to you adding some notes to an already-built form. When you place the room in the model, Revit automatically tags it. Unlike other drafting applications, however, Revit doesn’t rely on the tag for its information. When a room is in the model, it can either contain or not contain a tag. This is a great way to organize the flow of room information.


To get started, open the model you’ve been working on. If you missed the previous chapter, go to the book’s web page at www.sybex.com/go/revit2012ner. From there, you can browse to Chapter 15 and find the file called NER-26.rvt.


The objective of the following procedure is to find the Room & Area panel on the Home tab, and to configure and add some rooms to the model. Follow along:



  1. 1. In the Project Browser, find the dependent view called Level 1 East, and open it.
  2. 2. In the Room & Area panel on the Home tab, click the Room button, as shown in Figure 15.1.
    f1501.tif

    FIGURE 15.1 Clicking the Room button on the Room & Area panel of the Home tab


  3. 3. Hover your cursor over the southeast room, as shown in Figure 15.2. An X appears, along with the outline of a room tag.
  4. 4. When you see the X, pick a spot in the middle of the four walls.
  5. 5. Press Esc.
f1502.tif

FIGURE 15.2 When you hover your mouse over the intended area of the room, you see an indication that Revit has found the bounding edges.


You’ve now added a room to the model. Of course, it’s a nondescript room name with a nondescript room number. The following procedure will correct that. The objective here is to change the room name and number on the screen:



  1. 1. Select the room tag that you just added to the model.
  2. 2. Click the Room text.
  3. 3. Change the name to SOUTHEAST CORNER OFFICE.
  4. 4. Click room number 1.
  5. 5. Change the number to 101 (see Figure 15.3).

Now that you have a room in place and it’s named properly, you can start cooking in terms of adding more rooms. This is because Revit will begin to sequentially number the rooms as you place them into the model.

f1503.tif

FIGURE 15.3 Changing the room name and number to SOUTHEAST CORNER OFFICE and 101, respectively


The objective of the next procedure is to populate the rest of the east wing with rooms. Follow these steps:



  1. 1. On the Room & Area panel of the Home tab, click the Room button.
  2. 2. Place a room in the adjacent area, as shown at lower left in Figure 15.4.
  3. 3. Call the room SOUTHEAST CONFERENCE (see Figure 15.4).
  4. 4. On the Room & Area panel of the Home tab, click the Room button again.
  5. 5. Place a room in the radial entry area.
  6. 6. Rename the room EAST ENTRY.
  7. 7. Renumber the room 001.
  8. 8. Place a room in the south elevator shaft.
  9. 9. Rename and renumber it SOUTHEAST ELEVATOR and 010.
  10. 10. Place a room in the north elevator shaft.
  11. 11. Rename and renumber it NORTHEAST ELEVATOR and 011.
  12. 12. Place a room in the corridor.
  13. 13. Call it EAST WING CORRIDOR, and number it 100.
  14. 14. Just north of SOUTHEAST CONFERENCE and SOUTHEAST CORNER OFFICE, place two rooms, each called GATHERING. Number them 103 and 104 (see Figure 15.4).
    f1504.tif

    FIGURE 15.4 The first floor layout up to this point


  15. 15. Zoom over to the west portion of the east wing, where the lavatories are.
  16. 16. In the north lavatory, add a room named MEN’S, numbered 105.
  17. 17. In the south lavatory, add a room named WOMEN’S, numbered 106.

I think you’re getting the concept of adding rooms. Although you’ve added a number of rooms to the east wing, you need to begin adding some plain old offices. The next procedure will involve adding offices to the rest of the spaces in the east wing of Level 1. From there, you can look at a room’s properties and figure out how to alter the room information. Follow along:



  1. 1. Make sure you’re in the east wing area of the model, on Level 1.
  2. 2. On the Room & Area panel of the Home tab, click the Room button.
  3. 3. Pick the large area to the right of the women’s lavatory, as shown in Figure 15.5.
  4. 4. Rename the room OFFICE, and change the number to 107 (see Figure 15.5).
    f1505.tif

    FIGURE 15.5 Renaming the office


  5. 5. Click the Room button.
  6. 6. Add rooms to the rest of the vacant areas, renaming them all OFFICE. (Skip the kitchen area and the room to the right of it, as shown in Figure 15.6).
f1506.tif

FIGURE 15.6 Adding rooms to the remainder of the spaces


With all the rooms in (at least in this section of the building), you can begin examining specific properties to see how you can add functionality and further populate the database information pertaining to each room.


Configuring Properties


Each room has specific properties associated with it. There are floor finishes and wall finishes as well as ceiling types and finishes. It would be nice if Revit picked up this information by “reading” the ceilings, walls, and floors, but it doesn’t. And for good reason—imagine having to create a different wall type for each paint color, and then splitting each partition as it passed through each room. In Revit, you specify individual room finishes in the properties of the room itself.


The objective of the next procedure is to generate additional room information in the properties of the room. Follow these steps:



  1. 1. Zoom in on the SOUTHEAST CORNER OFFICE 101 room.
  2. 2. Hover your cursor over the room until you see the X, as you can see in Figure 15.7.
    f1507.tif

    FIGURE 15.7 Hover the cursor over the room until the X appears.

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Aug 3, 2021 | Posted by in Building and Construction | Comments Off on 15: Creating Rooms and Area Plans
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