From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

Adding rooms - Revit Tutorial

From the course: Revit 2024: Essential Training for Architecture

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Adding rooms

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to add some rooms to this simple model here. Now, at first glance, you might be looking at this plan and thinking, well, there already are rooms here. But it's important to understand that having an enclosed space isn't the same thing as having a room. So, in order for that to be recognized by Revit as being a room, we need to place something called a room element in that location. So, on the Architecture tab, there is this Room & Area panel here, and the room button is on that panel and the keyboard shortcut is RM. So, what I'm going to do is accept the default settings for this, which includes this setting right here which is tag on placement. And I'm just going to move my mouse down into the view window, but not into the floor plan yet, so I'm off to the side here. And you're going to get this little blue rectangle that appears. So, if I were to deselect tag on placement, you'd see that I would get just the blue rectangle without the label and then if I reselect it, I'll get the label back again. Now, I think in most cases when you're adding rooms, it's nice to see the labels, so having that tag on placement on is usually a pretty good idea. Now, I'm going to click out here in empty space. And when I do, that will actually generate a warning down here. Now, this is an ignorable warning. Remember the yellow tinted ones in the corner, you can just click anywhere and they will dismiss. It says that the room is not a properly enclosed region. And I'm going to come back and talk about that in just a moment. So, what do we mean by a properly enclosed region? Well, if we move into the plan somewhere into an enclosed space, like this bedroom in the upper left-hand corner, notice that the room now will conform to the shape of that enclosed space and I can click to place the second room in that location. Now I'm going to click the Modify tool to cancel out of there and notice that both rooms will disappear when I do. So, rooms by default are invisible and they only appear when you're either editing them actively or if you have them selected. So, if I move my mouse into this bedroom area, notice that I can locate that X that runs through it and I can click to select that room. Now, likewise over here, even this one which is not enclosed, I'm able to select if I can just find the edges or that X. When I select it, I want you to look over at the Properties palette and notice that it says not enclosed for both the area and perimeter. So now let me reselect the one here in the bedroom and we'll compare it. And notice that that one is generating the area and perimeter values because it is a properly enclosed room. So, that's one of the reasons why it's important to make sure that your rooms are in a properly enclosed area. So if I want to, I can take this room that I have off to the side and I can actually pull it into the plan. So, notice that there's a little move control right there in the middle, and if you click that and start to drag, you're able to pick this room up and move it, and it will actually start to conform to the spaces that you're moving it into. So I'm going to move it down here to this second bedroom and then let go. Now when I do that, the default behavior is for the tag to stay where it was. So, what I'm going to do is simply select the tag and uncheck this leader option, and the tag should now snap over to the location of the new room, okay? All right, so I now have the two bedrooms located in their respective spaces. Let's go back to the Room tool. And when we click the tool again, the Room tool will always highlight any existing rooms to let you know where they are. And because it's an invisible element, this is handy because that way, you won't accidentally place another room in the same location. If I were to do that, that generates a warning telling me that I've got a redundant room and that's generally considered a bad idea, so I'm going to cancel that to not go through with creating that room. Now what I'd like you to do in this pass is just focus on the enclosed spaces, so this little toilet room here, the small little linen closet beneath it, the toilet rooms here and the closet here. And notice that if you pay attention, you can get the tags to line up. Let's avoid this big space here for now. We'll come back and do that in a moment. Let's do each of the closets over here and the little utility room, and then maybe this closet right here. And then we're going to avoid this patio here for now as well. We'll come back to that momentarily also. So, I'm going to click the Modify tool to cancel out. And now let's talk about how to subdivide a large open space. So whenever you have an open plan situation, it's possible that you might want that to be represented by more than one room. So to do that, you're going to use this tool first called Room Separator. And this is simply a model line that you can draw in any shape that you like. Now, for this plan, we just need straight lines. That'll be suitable. So, you just start where you want that line to go and just draw it like any other line. So, I'm going to close off that little dining room right there. Press Escape one time to break the chain. I'm going to close off this hallway here, press Escape. I'm going to close off the kitchen here, press Escape. And then, maybe this little hallway right there and press Escape. So, now I've taken that large space and subdivided it into multiple smaller spaces. And then, I also want to indicate a patio out here. And because there are no walls defining this patio, that edge you see is actually a floor element. Floor elements are not going to bound the rooms in plan, only walls would do that or these room separator lines. I'm going to go ahead and surround that patio as well just simply by tracing over it. So now I'll click the Modify tool to cancel out of there and now I'm ready to do the last pass of creating rooms and fill in all of those spaces. So now, notice that it will sense each of these separately created spaces that I have just defined here using those room separators. And that includes this little patio on the exterior. So, when you're done, you can click the Modify tool there. And of course, now the next thing you'll notice is that all of the rooms just simply say room name, okay? So, the next thing I want you to see is where that information comes from. Now, the information is part of the room, not the tag. So, I want to stress that. So, I'm going to select one of these rooms here, like maybe the living room. Scroll down on the Properties, and notice that the name says room name. You can select that and type in something else. And when you apply that, notice that that will fill in the tag for you. Now, if I deselect the living room and select its tag instead, tags are just hosted elements that are reporting the information that they find in their host. So, if we look over here on the Properties palette, notice that we don't see room name or room number because that information is coming from the room that it's hosted to. Now, another way that I can tell that it's hosted is it highlighted the room that it's connected to. Up here on the ribbon, we've got these hosting buttons. So, there's lots of clues that I've got a hosted element. Now, having said all of that, it is possible to actually select a tag, click right on the label and modify that. And the result of that modification is it looks as though you're editing the tag, but in reality, what you were doing is simply changing the name of the host element room that that tag belongs to. So, it's really just a shortcut. And it's actually not that much different than what we've been doing with temporary dimensions all this time. So, when we want to move the door, one of the options that we can do is select the door and then edit the dimensions. We're not really changing the dimensions, we're using the dimension to move the door and that has the result of changing the dimension. So, perhaps that sounds like semantics, but if you think of it that way, I think it's easier to understand what you're actually doing. So, when I click on this label and change it, I'm not actually changing the tag, I'm changing the name of the underlying host room. So, using either of those two methods, select the object and edit its properties, or do it directly in the tag, go ahead and change all the remaining room names and when you're done, it should look something like this.

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