Friday, July 18, 2008

Tracking room separating lines

Room separating lines are a useful as well as essential elements. They allow you to sub-divide rooms into different areas. An example of this, is may be you have large open place office, but you need to sub-divide this into different departments or divisions. The room separator tool allows you to subdivide rooms.

roomsep_img1 

If a room is already contained within the project, the room boundaries will adjust to reflect the new room separation lines. You can then add a new room to the new separated space. You can then apply a colour scheme to reflect these subdivisions on the floor plan.

roomsep_img2 

All good stuff; but by default out of the box, room separating lines are drawn using black line work. To be honest this makes the tracking and location of room separating linework within a project, very awkward. Therefore, often its a good idea to amend the room separator line work style from black to an obvious colour, maybe red, green or blue and increase its default pen width to something larger so that's it obvious to see in a plan view. To do this, go to settings pulldown menu and line styles. Locate the line style called "Room Separation" and override these settings to something a bit more bold.

roomsep_img3 

roomsep_img4 Also, if you are using worksets, consider placing room separators on their own workset, to make the management and visibility control easier and more straight forward.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Revit MEP 2008 project upgrade, suddenly spaces appear

I discovered something strange today. I opened up a Revit MEP 2008 file into Revit Architecture 2009 and on completion of the project upgrade I found that as well as having rooms in the models, I also had the new Revit MEP 2009 spaces included! Now I hadn't expected this to happen, so I open the same file in Revit MEP 2009 and on completion of the project upgrade the model that also included the original rooms as well as the new space objects. I then started a new Revit MEP 2008 project from scratch and added some rooms and did the same exercise of opening the file in RAC 2009 as well as MEP 2009. This time, no space objects! Weird.....

space_img 

So I went back to the 2008 version and checked all my area and volume settings were set correctly. Everything was fine. What I then remembered was that I had run an IES heating and coolings load calculation on the model even though I hadn't saved the reports that IES had created. So to test this I created a new model in MEP 2008, added some rooms and ran a heating and cooling loads report. I then opened the model in Revit Architecture as well as Revit MEP 2009 and hey presto "spaces" as well as "rooms".