Adding rooms - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to add room elements to this simple floor plan. Now, your first reaction might be room elements, what's that? I already have rooms. Well, what we have is the enclosing wall geometry and we tend to think of any enclosed space as a room, but until we actually place a room element in our model, Revit doesn't know that we actually have a room there. So room elements are actually technically part of the model. They are considered model geometry and they have size and height and volume and so on. But, they graphically won't display because typically, the way that this plan displays is what I would want to see. But if you want to be able to name and number your spaces, if you want to be able to calculate the area and the volume, if you want to be able to assign occupancy information, department information, and any number of other kinds of information and data to the spaces within your project, you need to add room elements. And it's fairly easy to do that. So let's go to the architecture tab and click on the room button. Now, the default behavior is to not only place a room, but also to place a tag. So if I move my mouse into the model canvas a little bit here, you'll see I get this blue outline. That's the room. And then I also have superimposed on that something that says the word room. That's the tag. If you were to unclick this and kind of move back in this space, you'll just get the blue outline. So since most of the time we want to have room tags to label what each of the spaces is, using that tag on placement feature is a pretty good idea. So we're going to go ahead and accept that default. Now, if I click outside the plan somewhere, what will happen is I'll get this error that tells me that the room is not a properly enclosed region. So let me click my modify tool to cancel out of there, and then I'll just sort of click anywhere to dismiss that warning. And when I deselect the room, it disappears. Now, it's still there. If you move your mouse over here, you can find it just by kind of hovering where you know it used to be. And if you click, you'll see that that room does select, and it is in fact there. Now if you look at it over on the properties pallet, it knows it's on level one, but that's about the only bit of useful information that it can give us. Notice the area, the perimeter, everything is non-enclosed, and that's what the warning was telling us. So while it's certainly possible to create non-enclosed rooms, they won't be as valuable as enclosed rooms will be because they're not able to calculate any of this information. You could, however, fill in any of the other information which is just data, so the name, the number, the occupant, any of that stuff would certainly be possible. So what I'm going to do is click away from that room to deselect it. I'll do Control+Z to undo that, and let's start again, but this time I want to create the rooms within the floor plan. So I'll go back to my room, I'll accept the default, and I'll come into this space right here, this bedroom at the corner, and notice that just moving the mouse into that space it senses where the room geometry is and fills the space. So this is very similar to what we did with ceilings and all it takes is a single click to place this room. Now, as you place rooms, they will stay highlighted on screen when you're in this command. I can move down here to place the next bedroom, and notice that if you just pay attention, Revit is trying to line up your room tags with one another, so it's fairly easy for me to kind of go from room to room here and organize it so that the tags are lined up for a nice, orderly presentation. Now, what I'm going to do is place a room in each of the enclosed spaces, like so. I'm not really concerned with the names or the numbers just yet. We'll deal with that shortly. But what I want you to see is, when you're done placing all the enclosed spaces, the remaining spaces are not enclosed. And so if you try to place a room, it would flow out into all of the available space, which is not really what we want here. So I'm going to cancel out of the room command, and we need to add another element called a room separation, which would allow us to subdivide this open plan space into several rooms. So any time you have an open plan space and there's no wall geometry there, you're going to need some other method to subdivide that space. So right below the room button is the room separator. Now when you click that, this is just a kind of model line, and you can draw it in any shape you like. I'll just stick with the simple straight lines here. And I'll just come in and cap off these spaces here. So I need a dining room there, a little corridor here. Cap that off. I want to make a little foyer over here and the living room space here, and in fact, out here I've got this patio and if you want to be able to put a room there, you might want to trace over the patio shape also because the edge of the floor slab does not define rooms. You'd have to have walls there. And nor does this railing. So I'll just add a few room separators out in that location as well. So now I'll go back to the room command and now notice that I can place rooms in these enclosed spaces that I've just defined using those room separators. And so I'm going to finish up placing the remainder of the rooms here and I'll just try and be neat about my tag placement. And then, finally, because I placed room separators out here at the patio, I'll be able to place a room out there as well. So no that I've got all of my rooms, let's talk about some of the things that we can do with rooms. First of all, when they're not selected, how do you select them? Well, if you move your mouse near the edge of a space, it'll highlight the wall. So if you did it that way you'd have to tab a few times before you'd be able to reach in and get the room. But remember that they have this x running through the middle, so it's actually much easier to select the room if you just look for that x. And then you click it. So if you just sort of move your mouse around in an empty space, you'll be able to tell right away if there's any rooms there because it'll start to highlight that x when your mouse is over it, so it makes it really easy for you to make those selections. Let me zoom in right here and all the rooms currently are just called Room. So now what I want to do is actually rename them so that they're a little bit more descriptive. So, to do that, I'm going to select one of my rooms. I'll select the living room here in the middle of the plan. Scroll down on the properties pallet, and notice that under identity data we have the number and the name. So all I need to do is type in the name that I want here and when I apply that, you'll see that the tag updates. Now, you could do that on as many rooms as you like. So I could select the kitchen next, and apply that. And again the tag is updating to reflect that change. It's really important that you understand that the room and the tag are actually two separate things. So what I'm going to do is come up here to this dining room and I'll select the room first and you'll see it will highlight. Then I'll go over and I'll select the tag and you see it highlights a little differently. So those are two separate objects. When the tag is selected, notice that over here on the properties you don't get any of the information for the room. The information does not live in the tag, even though it looks like it does. The information is actually part of the room. All the tag is doing is reporting the information from its host room element. In fact, the tag isn't even really necessary. I could delete the tag and, even though it will alert me that I've done that, really what it's trying to tell me is hey you've still got a room there that you might not know is there because there's no longer a tag. But notice I can still select it. And this room, and all of it's information, is still here. And if I come down here and I change the name of this, that room is now Dining Room. Well, if we go back to the room and area panel, there's a tag room button right here. R+T is the shortcut. If I start to move into the plan, it will sense the names of the spaces underneath my cursor. So this is Kitchen right here. This is Living Room here, and this one is Dining Room. So it knows that this is the dining room even though I previously deleted the other tag. So I hope that illustrates for you that the tag is not the source of the information. It's actually on the receiving end. But having said that, you can actually use the tag to modify the element if you wish by just simply selecting the tag. The labels will become bold, then you can click on them again and they activate almost like temporary dimensions do, and I can type in the name that I want. So what that actually did is it went in there and it updated the name of that room. So, no matter whether you do it directly on the tag or on the room itself, you're always editing the room. So that's really important to understand. So what I'd like you to do now is just go ahead and finish renaming all these rooms. Now if you have two rooms that are the same, like this one and this one, they're both bedrooms, you can actually use your control key, select them together, and then just type in the value once and that'll update both tags so that can be a little bit quicker. So you can certainly do that for all of the closets and for the toilet rooms. So just go ahead and update the names of all of the rooms and when you're done, it should look something like this.