Adding rooms - Revit Architecture Tutorial

and rooms are really largely a utility object and, by default, they're invisible. So that makes them somewhat unique in terms of all of the other model elements, where most model elements are visible, unless you specifically hide them. Rooms are invisible unless you specifically show them. So that's going to make them a little bit special But rooms are very, very important in any building information model that we create using Revit because they house lots of really useful information. So to get started, let's just go ahead and add some rooms and then I think it'll become a little bit more clear how they function after you've done so. So to get started I'll come up here to the room and area panel and click the room button or R + M is the shortcut. Now if I move my mouse out into empty space here, you're going to see a little blue outline, that's the room, and then on top of that is a black rectangle with a word above it. That is the room tag and that's controlled by this tag on placement button right here. So that's enabled by default and if you were to disable that you would get only the room without a tag so I think that when it's time to add rooms, the tags can actually become quite useful so it's a pretty good idea to go ahead and have that tag on placement turned on. So the next thing is that if I move my mouse into the floor plan, you're going to see it flow into the enclosed space defined by the walls. So as you sort of move around here before you click, you're going to see it flow into all these available spaces. Now the one space that's potentially problematic for us is this big open space in the middle because that's the living room, the dining room, the kitchen but the room object has no way of knowing where the dining room begins and living room ends. So we're going to need to give it a little bit of help with that one. Well initially what I'm going to do is I know that I want a hallway right here where we enter the unit so that's where I'm actually going to click to place this first room and yes, it will flow out into all of the surrounding spaces. Okay, so I could continue at this point and create additional rooms in closed spaces or, it turns out that there's a button right here that's sometimes a little bit faster. This allows us to place rooms automatically. And with a single click it will find all of the enclosed spaces that remain in my floor plan and place a room within those. And in this case it says it created nine rooms for me. Now notice that while you're in the command all the rooms are still highlighted but when you close this it will finish the command and deselect all the rooms and now you can see what I meant earlier about how the rooms are invisible. Now just because they are not displayed on screen doesn't mean they're not there. If you move your mouse around on the screen, it's easy enough to find them because they all have this X running through them. And if you click on that X it will select the room and then over here on the properties pallet, you can see its properties. So I can see that this room is one level one and it's got an area and perimeter and down here is the name and number and a little further down there's some finishes. So there's a lot of information that's contained within this room element. Now I'm going to zoom in slightly on this room tag and I want to show you how this information interacts with the tag. Sometimes people mistakenly think that the tag is driving the room. Well it's actually the opposite. The tag is simply hosted to the room and whatever the room does the tag will react to it. So I can show you that easily enough by changing the name of the room here and then when I apply that, notice that that change will apply to the tag automatically. So by simply changing the value in the room element, the tag automatically sees that change. Now if I deselect the room and instead select the tag, another way that you can tell that it's related to the room is because it will actually highlight the room boundary that it belongs to. Now if you look at the properties pallet for the tag, you'll see that it doesn't have any properties of its own, it just says leader and orientation, but there is now name or number. to find the X that runs through it. Now I want that to be the halfway because of where I placed it but what I want to do is create new rooms for the kitchen, the living room, the dining room. How am I going to do that? Well I'm sure you would agree that it would be unreasonable if we had to place new walls. We're not going to change the design of our architecture in order to accommodate the room object. So what do we do instead? Well if I come back over here to the architecture tab, I've got something called a room separator. And with a room separator I've got all these different shapes and what I do is I simply draw one or more room separation lines, and let me just draw that first one and show you what impact that's already had on that room. So by just simply drawing that room separator, it's capped off that one doorway and now notice that the room from my hallway includes both the hallway and the kitchen. So if I add another room separator across this opening, now my hallway contains just the space that I was after. Now I can add a few additional room separators right here, press escape once, and here, and then cancel out of the command. And now if I go back to my room command, notice that it highlights any rooms that already exist. They do that so that you won't accidentally place two rooms in the same spot. And then I can come in and place the additional rooms that I want in my plan by just sort of clicking those. Now I could use the automatic rooms button again and you're welcome to do so but I think it's just as quick in this case to just place those last few remaining rooms. So that shows you a little bit about how you can start to separate larger spaces into these smaller rooms. Now this is a separate category called room separation and you can actually hide that category so that the rooms remain but you're not going to see any of those separation lines. So if you don't want to see those separations lines, you don't have to, they're very easy to hide. So now what I want to do, is just sort of go in and start renaming all of these rooms to more logical names. And there's going to be two ways that we can do that. So the first way is what I've already shown you. Select the room, scroll down over here on the properties pallet, and give it a new name. When you apply, the tag will update. Or it turns out that tags can actually be used as a shortcut to rename the rooms. So if I select the tag, you'll see that the text in the tag highlights and becomes blue. I can click right on those blue labels and edit them directly. And this is very similar to what we've done previously with temporary dimensions. So if you think of this this way, if I select the wall and I see a temporary dimension, even though you may be thinking to yourself, I want to edit that dimension, what's really happening? You're not really editing that dimension. What you're doing is using the dimension to move the wall. So likewise, even though you're clicking on the tag and changing its name, you're not really changing the tag. What you're doing is using the tag to change the room. So you'll notice here that the room updates with the new value. So go ahead and use either technique to change all the room names and when you're done it should look something like this. Now one last thing. I'm going to zoom in over here and one small consequence of using the create rooms automatically is that sometimes it'll create rooms in spaces where you don't want them. So my linen closet is fine but right next to it I've got a small room in a little shaft there that I don't want. Now it could be tricky to select those little tiny spaces because, unlike regular rooms where you can go find that X, it's a little more difficult to find it here. If you zoom in close enough you should be able to find it. You could use your Tab key but let me show you another trick. If I select the tag first, there is a button up here that says select host. So because the tag is a hosted element, I can use the tag to select the corresponding host. That'll select the room for me and then I can simply delete it. Now I will get a warning about that which I'm going to dismiss for the time being. that which I'm going to dismiss for the time being. I'll type Z + P to zoom previous I'll type Z + P to zoom previous and that completes our room layout. and that completes our room layout. So I encourage you to experiment a little further So I encourage you to experiment a little further with adding rooms with adding rooms and changing their boundaries using room separators. and changing their boundaries using room separators. Just get comfortable with how the room object functions Just get comfortable with how the room object functions with respect to adding them to various floor plans. with respect to adding them to various floor plans.