Adding rooms

In this movie, we're going to talk about the room element. Now a room is something that's pretty well understood without too much explanation. After all, we occupy rooms in our everyday lives. But what is a room really? Is it the four walls that surround it, or is it the space and the air thus enclosed? This is precisely the challenge that the Revit programmers had to solve when devising the Room object. In Revit, we have room elements that are special objects that automatically conform to the shape of surrounding geometry, and thus accurately represent the space so enclosed.

Rooms have some special behaviors in the way that they're added, the way that they display, and the way that they're modified, and so rooms will be the subject of this movie. I'm in a file called Adding Rooms, and I'm in Floor Plan Level 1. And up here on the Architecture tab, I want to go to the Room and Area panel and click the Room button. Now on the Modify Place Room tab, we have a Tag panel, and you could see that there's a button here called Tag on Placement, and it's lit up. It's pushed in. If you click it, it de-selects, but it's lit up by default. And what that tells me is, if I move my mouse into the screen, not only am I going to get a room, but I'm also going to get a room tag. And with rooms that's actually pretty handy, so we're going to leave that feature turned on.

So make sure that this is pushed right here. Now, as I said, rooms conform to the shape of surrounding geometry. So if my cursor is out here, outside of the floor plan, and there's no surrounding geometry and I click, what will actually happen is you'll get an error message and Revit will warn you that the room is not a properly enclosed region. Now, you could ignore that if you wanted to. I'm going to press Escape here to cancel out of the command. It looks like there's nothing there except a room tag, but in fact, if I move my mouse over here, you can see that there really is something here. The thing is, if I select it and I look over here on the Properties, it's going to tell me that it's not enclosed.

So Revit can't do things like calculate the area or the perimeter. These are useful features of the Room object, so typically you're going to want your rooms to be enclosed. So what I'm going to do is press Ctrl+Z to undo and remove that previous room, and I'm going to start again. And watch the difference in behavior this time when I move my mouse into the floor plan. Notice that it's finding the surrounding wall geometry as I go from space to space here.

So I'm going to place my first room in this upper left-hand corner right there. And this time it won't generate an error message; it will just simply place the room. And what I'm going to do is place a couple more of these. Now notice that if you move around carefully, Revit will try and line up your room tags, so that's pretty handy. Now, I'm going to avoid this big open space in the middle. We'll talk about that in a minute. So let's do the closets, let's do the toilet rooms, let's do the toilet rooms, this small closet, this small closet, this one here, and the utility room here.

Now that leaves me with this big space here, and what you'll see is a single room is flowing into all of the surrounding spaces. If I were to actually click and place this room, I would get this one very large amorphous room. So what I want to do instead is I'm going to press Escape here and cancel out the command and I want to look at something called a room separator. You could certainly draw in new walls and say, well, there's a dining room here, and there's a kitchen here, but I don't want to change my architecture in order to accommodate the Room object.

So rather, what I want to do is indicate to Revit where I want the room separations to be. So when I click this room separator, it's a kind of model line, and you can see over here that we can draw all of the usual shapes. And in this case, all I need is the straight line and I'm going to start right at this end point and draw a line like so, and then another one from here to here, and from here to here, and from here to here. And so what I'm just doing is saying this is going to living room, the dining room, a corridor, the kitchen.

So I just want make sure that I create a boundary in each of those spaces. Now if I go back to the Room object, notice that it sees not only the walls, but it sees those room separators as well. And I can place my remaining rooms very quickly, like so. And let's cancel out of there. Okay, now I didn't really pay much attention to the numbering. We're going to look at that in another movie. What I do want to do here is show you a couple of the properties of the room object.

Now, let's start with selection. How do you select a room once you have it already, because of course, as you can see we don't see anything, so that's a little bit of the challenge with room objects. Well, you could move your mouse around the edge and try and find it. And in fact, if I press the Tab key, eventually I will find the room. And I can click and when it's selected, it highlights, in blue and so it's very easy to see that I've got that room. And if I look over here, it says got a room it's on Level 1, and it even tells me what the area and perimeter of that room is.

So it's all pretty useful information. Well, it turns out there's a much easier way to select the rooms. Move your mouse around kind of in a circle in the space and what you'll see is at four points along the way you'll find this little X right here, and if I just click that, that's the fastest way to select the rooms. So Revit gives us this little X indicator, these symbols that go through the middle of the room. They call them the reference, OK, those are the room references, and it just makes it a little easier to select the rooms. With a little bit of practice, you'll be able to find these things pretty quickly and go around and select your individual rooms.

Now there's a couple of ways that we can change the names. If I zoom in a little bit here, over here I've got room, room, room and really what I want is living room, kitchen, and bedroom. So you can either select the tag--now if you select the tag it's important to understand that the tag is not the room; the tag is a separate element that's linked to the room. Notice up here it says Modify Room Tags. If I go over here and find the X, the reference, it says modify rooms. Not the same thing.

So if I click the room tag, even though it's a separate object, it's linked to the room object. So that means if I click on the word "room" here and type in something else, and later come back and click on this X and scroll down over here, you can see that it's one and the same. So even though I changed it there, it's changed over here. In fact, if I selected this number here and I decided to make that 100 and I press Enter, when I apply that, it'll update the tag.

So you can actually modify it on the Properties palette with the rooms selected or you can modify it in the drawing with the tag selected. You're modifying the same thing in both cases. But if I come over here and I select this one and come to the Properties palette and instead of room, write in "kitchen," press Enter, you're going to see that update over here. In fact, if I pan the drawing just a little bit, zoom out a touch, select this one, hold down the Control key, and find this one, you can see they both say room and room right now, but both are those should be bedrooms. And when I do that, it'll update both at the same time.

So with a little bit of a strategy, you'll be able to move fairly quickly through the floor plan and rename all the rooms. So when your rooms are all renamed it might look something like this. So Room objects represent the actual spaces that we occupy in a building project. Typically, they don't display anything graphically onscreen unless they're selected. That's handy because we typically don't want to draw anything for the rooms. It's sort of implied and it's understood that there's a room in the surrounding area that's enclosed by a bunch of walls. But Revit still has an object there that we can easily select, modify, change things like the name and number, or we can even add additional properties to it as well.