Learn how to add and designate new spaces in a building plan using architectural software. The article covers everything from creating room separators, placing rooms, to modifying room tag families and naming spaces.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to designate different spaces within a building plan, such as lobbies, open offices, private offices, phone rooms, and conference rooms. These spaces can be defined and separated using the 'room separator' tool.
- Modifying room tag families allows for customizing how spaces are labeled and identified. The tutorial shows how to delete unnecessary values, reposition labels, and save tag families for specific uses.
- The article also demonstrates how to quickly add and name rooms, either individually or in bulk, using the 'place rooms' function. This can be particularly useful when adding multiple rooms of the same type, such as offices or phone rooms.
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Now we're going to take a look at adding our rooms into this space, and there are a couple of things that we should do first. One of them is that we should designate our different spaces. And so we do have the lobby area here and the break room, which we've already designated the break room, and then we have open offices, many private offices, phone rooms, and conference rooms. And so if it's not divided up by walls, like the offices are from the open office area, then that's something we need to look at doing here.
And so, like our lobby here, it is definitely a space that's open to the rest of the building, but we want to make sure that it's designated as lobby space so we can accurately calculate our square footage. If I go to Architecture and Room Separator, I can go ahead and designate these two spaces as being different just by adding room separators to create this box here. And all I did was—really this was an arbitrary point here—we could probably just say, just to keep it simple, we could line it up here and here.
And now when I go to place rooms using that keyboard shortcut RM, I can go ahead and drop it in here, and now I've got a lobby. For the purpose of this exercise, we don't need the Room Tag and everything on there. And so when you look here, you've got different options.
And so if we said Room Tag with Area, then it'll show me the area and the number. And if I just do Room Tag, it's going to show me the name of the room and the number. But I actually just want to get rid of the number and just have it show the area and the room name.
And to do that, I'm going to have to modify this family. And so when I click on this Room Tag family, I can go to Edit Family, and it'll pop up the family. And you can see here, the three values that we're working with here are Room Name, Room Number, and then Area and Volume are both in here.
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So I'm going to go ahead and select Volume. And I'm actually going to delete that because we're never going to use that one. And then I'm going to go in and I'm actually going to delete the Area or the Room Number.
And then I'm going to take the value I have for Area, and I want to drag that up vertically so that it sits down here below the Room Name. And that's the look that we're going for.
And so we're going to save this because we don't want to ruin our other Room Tag, because that one does have value. So I want to go ahead and do a File > Save As, and I'm going to save that family. And I'm going to go ahead and call it Room Tag—Name Area, because that's really all it's going to be used for.
The next thing I need to do is look at my Family Types that we have here. And we can really get rid of all of these because we're not going to use it that way. So I have the Room Tag—I'm going to delete that one.
And then I'm going to delete the one that says Room Tag with Volume. And then I want to make sure I've got that it's going to show the Area, and the Show Room Number parameter is irrelevant now. We don't have to worry about that.
And you can actually delete it if you wanted to, because we're not actually using that parameter. And so I've got Show Area shown as checked, and then Room Tag with Area is the only type we have. And so when you click on the Area, you can see there's a little equals for the visible, and that's associated with this Show Area parameter.
So I'll go ahead and save it since we did Save As a new type here. And I'll load it into my project. And I'm going to jump back over to my Level One TI View.
And so this tag is just Room Tag. But if I change it to Room Tag—Name Area, then it's going to give us the look we want. And you can see we lost—or we left—one thing behind here.
And that's really common in a lot of these Revit families, especially the ones that are created by Autodesk. They'll hide many things. So in here, you don't see any box or anything.
But if I go to Visibility/Graphic Overrides and the annotation categories, you can see they're actually not even being shown. And so if I were to turn that on, you can see the reference plane that centers this thing is there. And then we also have the box that would have been around the Room Number still there.
And so I can go ahead and select those lines and delete them, and save it again. And then I can load it back into my project. And I'm going to go ahead and overwrite the existing version.
And now we've got the tag that we were looking for. So I can go in here, and I can give it the name I wanted, which was Lobby.
And then I can go through and name the rest of the spaces here. If I were to create more rooms, it's using the right tag that I want. And that's important here.
But this room—we're going to go ahead and call this one our Open Office. And you can go through. There are a couple different ways that we can do this. You can go in and add all the rooms and then go back and rename them. Or you can go through like we're doing right now—
And you can add the rooms, rename it, add the next room, rename it, and so on. So that'll be a Conference Room. And then I'm going to go ahead and I'm actually going to add many of these ones in because they're all going to have the same name, and I'm going to change them in bulk.
And by change them in bulk, what I mean is I'm going to select all of them like I just did here and filter it out to get to the room. And then you can see the Room Name is set to "Room, " and I'm just going to change it to "Office" and change them all.
The one thing I didn't want to do is change this one—I'm going to call this one a Server Room. But to place all those rooms very quickly and then change the tag at the same time is the way to go. And so I'm going to do the same thing here for the phone rooms.
I'm just going to place all three of them, and then I'm going to change this first one. If I call that a Phone Room, what you can see is if I select the next room here, the name—it's going to give me the options for all the names that I've used so far.
And so I can change it to "Phone, " or since it's so easy to type, you can just go ahead and do that as well. So the next thing we'll do here is—this is another Open Office area.
This is our Break Room. And we'll come back in and clean these up. And then we have our Conference Rooms.
Alright, so now we have all of our different spaces designated. And so we'll have to take a look at how we want to color this plan next.
