From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

Adding rooms - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2021: Essential Training for Architecture (Imperial and Metric)

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Adding rooms

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In this video, we're going to add some rooms to our modal. Now at first you might be looking at our plan and saying, what are you talking about? We already have rooms. Well, we don't actually have rooms, what we have are room bounding elements. So yes, there are a bunch of walls here, but in order for Revit to actually see those enclosed spaces as rooms, we need to place a room element in those locations. Now room elements are a special kind of object in Revit that are invisible unless you have them selected, but they can store all sorts of useful information. Things like the name, the number, the occupancy information, department, finishes, etc. Placing the rooms is pretty easy, so we're going to do that first, then we'll go in and assign all their names to them. So let's get started with the room command. So on the architecture tab, on the room and area panel, we're going to click the room button, or r + m, is the shortcut. By default, it will also turn on this tag on placement command. So the way that works is, if I move my mouse into the view window, you're going to see this little blue rectangle with an X through it. That's the room. And then the tag is the word room with the rectangle floating beneath it. If you turned off the tag on placement, you'd only get the room. But I think in most cases, having the tags is helpful So we're going to make sure that that's turned on and Revit will create both elements for us, in a single step. Now if you were to click out here, it'll generate a warning, and it will say that the room is not properly enclosed. If we went to the modify tool to cancel the command, and then click anywhere to deselect, you will see that room that was highlighted in orange disappears, but it's still there. So if you move your mouse nearby, you'll see that we're able to highlight it. and if we select it, it is a selectable room, it's just that at the moment over here on the property's pallet, it says that it's not enclosed. We'd much rather have enclosed rooms, properly bound rooms. So let's go to the undo command, undo that, and start again. So we'll click the room command, accept tag on placement, and this time I'd like you to move around inside the floor plan. And you see it will highlight any of the enclosed spaces. Now let's avoid this big open space in the middle, we'll come back to that at the end. So what I want you to do is maybe in this first bedroom up here in the corner, just sort of click to place that room. Now this time it won't generate a warning, and it will conform to the shape of the bedroom. Notice that if you move into another enclosed space, the tags try to line up with one another, and most of the time, that makes for a nice, neat presentation. So what I'd like you to do is just work your way through all of the enclosed spaces in the plan here, even these little small closets. Just make sure that you line up the tags wherever possible. Okay, so that leaves us with the one big open space, and as I said, we want to treat this one a little bit differently. So, let me click the modify tool to cancel out of the command, and let's look at the room separator next. So whenever you have an open plan space like we have there, and you want to put different rooms, like I want a dining room here, and a living room here, and a kitchen here. We're going to use the room separator to help us do that. So room separators are just modal lines that we use to separate different rooms from one another. So I'll stick with the straight line option here, and we'll just simply draw some lines to separate these spaces from each other. So with just a few well placed modal lines, I've now divided those into separate spaces, and I'm going to also trace this patio out here, because the patio is comprised of a floor and a railing. Neither of those are room bounding elements. So if you want to be able to create an enclosed patio on the exterior there, we need to put boundaries out there as well. So once we've done that, we can return to the room command and you should be able to finish up placing your rooms. And again, I'm just going to be careful to get those tags to line up neatly with one another. And place each of the remaining rooms that I want here in my plan. Okay, so the nice thing about the room tool is they all stay highlighted while you're placing rooms so you know that you're finished, and then I'll click modify to complete the command. So now if we look at the tags, we can see that they're all just named room. So next let's deal with the room names. It's really important that you understand that the room name is a property of the room, not of the tag. So what do I mean by that? Well let me start with this room right here, this dining room. And notice that there's an X around it. So it's real easy to select if you just look for that little X, otherwise, if you're at the edge, you're going to have to use your tab key and eventually get to it. And that certainly works, but it's much easier if you just find that little X running through it. Once I've got that room selected, we'll look over here at the property's pallet, and you'll see lots of information about that room, including it's name right here. So, I simply type in the name that I want, and when I apply it, notice that the tag will update. Now, as I said, that information is part of the room, not part of the tag. The tag is a hosted element that is reading the information from its host object, the room. So, deselect the room and come back and select the tag instead. And notice that it highlights differently. And there's some buttons up here that talk about hosting. So that's how you can tell that it's a hosted element. This tag does not have the property's for room name and room number, even though it's showing us that information. So if you selected the tag, there wouldn't be any way to edit that over here on the property's pallet. And in fact, the tag isn't even really required. So if I were to delete the tag, Revit will give us a warning and it will warn me that I've deleted the room tag, but the room still exists, and you can see it highlighted in orange here, but if I click away from it, it disappears. Now that doesn't mean it's not there. It's still there, and over here it's still called dining room. So if I go back to the architecture tab, room and area panel, there's a tag room button, r + t is the shortcut, and notice that I can come back and reapply this tag by placing a new one in that location. And in fact, in the other locations it'll still just say room, because I haven't named any of those yet, but it will allow itself to be hosted to any of the rooms in your modal. So that's kind of a long way of my saying, that what's important is the room, not as much the tag. Now having said that, you can actually edit the room data from the tag as well. So sometimes you might find it more convenient to click on the tag first, and then click right on the label, and type in a name in that tag. Now what you actually did, if you deselect it and look for the X running through the room, and select it, is edit the value in the room. So I actually don't care which way you do it, but using either method that I just showed you, I'd like you to go in and name all of the rooms. But I do want to share with you one more tip here. In cases when you have the same room name twice, it is going to be more efficient to use your control key, select the two rooms, not the two room tags, and change it on the property's pallet. And then both tags will feed. So in cases where there's only one, like the living room, it might be faster on the tag. So go ahead and name all of the rooms, and when you're done, it should look something like this.

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