Apartment identification in floor plan

[Eliseppa]

What would be the way of showing apartment identification information in a floor plan? I've created an area plan where i have a tag that shows how many rooms  and squaremeters there are in an apartment (rentable area). Now i want the same information to be shown in normal floor plan but can't figure out any method of linking the information.

[LisaDrago]

I am not exactly sure what you are looking for - can you post an image of what you want.

One thought i have is to make your interior walls not room bounding and then using room seperation lines to control you room tags. Not sure if this will get you what you are looking for.

any other info would be great!.

LD

[Eliseppa]

Also thougt that room area would be the answer but since i already have each room's area calculated in my plan so i wasn't able to create another room area boundary in that same plan.

Or maybe i should have made the area plan "the actual plan" and use room areas for separate rooms there?

There is an image attached to show what i want.

Thanks!

[dnenov]

'Apartment identification in floor plan' sounds as clear and concise way to describe this Revit limitation as any other Lisa, it really surprises me that you 'are not exactly sure what' the person, and the whole World using Revit, is looking for ... .

How can you identify an Apartment in a floor plan. Is that clearer?

Let me try one more time. You know Apartment, right? It is A Residential Unit. An entity that harbors other smaller things inside of it. Like Rooms. If you live in a house yourself, then treat the house as one big apartment.

Back to Revit. Revit has a program called 'Revit Architecture', which hints to the target group. An architect would want to have the ability to display information relevant to the Rooms in his floor plans - names, areas, finishes. Revit gives said architect Rooms! Now the architect wants the same ability, but for the larger entity, the one that encapsulates a cluster of rooms - the Apartment. Revit gives her .. Areas .. probably? It cannot be Rooms, since Rooms are already used for Rooms and they are smaller .. so it must be Areas, that's how the logic goes. Certainly, you can use Areas for more than apartments. Surely, Area measurements differ - you would measure NIA different to GIA for example.

We agree to suck it up and not have an automatic tool for Areas. We draw manual lines. The all frustrating moment comes when we realise we CANNOT SHOW ANY OF THAT IN OUR FLOOR PLANS. What is the big mystery here?!? Just tell the poor soul that Revit doesn't play ball with Architects on this matter and be done with it! No need to pretend you don't understand the question.

Give us the ability to tag Apartments on Floor Plans! Simple as that!

Thank you.

[LisaDrago]

WOW @dnenov - you seem a little upset over a 5 year old post.

I hope you have taken a moment and collected yourself.

I was asking for a little clarification, that in itself should not cause agitation. 

If I do not fully understand what exactly you are looking for, then I am unable to assist. 

It is not always easy to understand what someone is looking for, so I like to get a bit more clarification to make sure I am on the same page as them and continue to help if I can.

I must have missed the follow-up post and did not respond.

I do apoligize @Eliseppa for not following up the post.

One idea is that you could create a tag that reads and displays a parameter that calculates the area of an entire apartment. You could possibly add it to a room tag.

So you already have the ability to do what was asked, you will just need to pull it together in a tag.

I would like to take a moment to clarify that I am an end user like you @dnenov.

I do not work for Autodesk. I, as 99.9% of us here, use my personal time to respond and help where I can.

Getting agitated and snippy does nothing except show your lack of self-control.

Frustration does happen - it is all in what you do with that frustration that matters. Taking it out on others is never a good idea.

I am more then happy to help where I can and hope you continue to post and get the assistance you need to continue on your projects.

[dnenov]

Dear Lisa,

I was not correct to attack you in my frustration and I apologise. Lack of self-control it was and it was based entirely on the fact that 5 years later (or 10 or 20) things like that have not been resolved.

Of course, I am aware of the potential workarounds. Creating a shared parameter and making your rooms report the apartment iformation, even when automated through Dynamo, is a frozen-state process that would not update. Displaying the summed up room area gives you the Clear Area and not the Net Internal one, which is more often than not the case. Overlaying Area and Floor Plan is simply a no-go for me, as having to maintain that structure is really cumbersome.

There are 'workarounds' but for the leading software on the market, that's not an option.

I apologise once again.

Best Regards,

Deyan

[LisaDrago]

Thank you @dnenov for the apology - it is accepted.

I do understand the frustrations felt - I myself have been using Revit for over 10 years now - I get it.

Work-arounds are not the best. It is what I can do to get what I need, so I do it until what I need is given.

Its not perfect - never will be.

I hope to be of help in the future, if needed.

Have a great rest of your day!

LD

[aghis_no]

Create a shared parameter (let's say "apartment number") add this parameter to your rooms and use this parameter to assign to all the rooms of the same apartment the same apartment number.
Then create a room tag that displays only the shared parameter "apartment number" and use this tag just on one of the rooms of the apartment. This way you can simulate the equivalent of your area tag.
Hope it helps
Aghis

[aghis_no]

To complete my post as far as total surface area of the rooms of the apartment is concerned:

For the calculation of the total apartment area based on the addition of individual rooms, you can use "spaces" instead of "rooms".

"Spaces" are meant for MEP usage, however, they behave as rooms and they have the ability to be combined together in "space Zones" that calculate the total area of the combined spaces. You can Tag a "Zone" to have a graphical representation of the summed area on your plan.

So instead of rooms you can always use spaces if you wish.

hope it helps

[dnenov]

Dear aghis_no,

Thank you for the ideas. If you read through my comment, you will see that I am referring to those as workarounds and so finding them unsuitable. 

As for Spaces, Revit Architecture has no access to said entities, or at least I am not aware how to enable their usage. 

However, an equivalent for "space Zones", as you call it, is exactly what is needed! I really see no reason for this functionality not being implemented for Rooms. The algorithm must exist and the political division between Spaces and Rooms can remain, if the developers insist on that, for maybe there are relations that I am not aware of. 

So what I ask for is simple - give us the ability to group rooms to "room Zones", which we will use as Apartments. And when I say "give us", I am not asking personally you or Lisa, but Autodesk, as this is a forum under their bonnet, so they must be reading it or should at least be sensitive for the activities that are happening around here. 

(The first workaround method is not acceptable, as it is not dynamic, as in if you change the apartment name, it won't update in the shared parameter + the rooms themselves have no ability to detect which apartment they belong to, so you may be blindly copy-pasting rooms without changing their instance parameter values and creating a little mess in the process.)

Thank you once again for the time and effort!

Best Regards,

Deyan

[dariawerynska]

Some more years have passed and I am still looking for a way to tag apartments' areas. Am I missing something or Revit still doesn't allow for it? 🙂

[james.grahamL3C2C]

The best-practice for multifamily residential work (read: apartments/condos) is to ensure that all of the walls in each individual unit group/link are set to not be room bounding (uncheck the box in the properties panel). This will create rooms for the area contained within your demising and corridor walls. 

The limitation here is that when you go to set up and draw your unit plans / sheets, you will not be able to tag rooms within the units themselves. I would not recommend creating redundant rooms, as this will clutter any room schedules you may wish to create.

Granted, this is only advisable for multifamily residential work, but after all, the original question was geared towards a multifamily project. Someone above was correct in saying the best practice for creating a "room of rooms" outside of these purposes would be the Spaces function, generally intended for MEP. 

[dnenov]

I like the start of your statement because it sounds really definitive 🙂 Alas, I don't think that answers the true question, which is - how do we get both the Unit and the Room concept simultaneously? Meaning being able to report that your Apartment #45 on Level 4 has 2 Bathrooms. This relies on having both an Apartment entity of sorts that is aware of Room entities inside. This would be the ideal scenario.

[RobDraw]

You now have access to the MEP tools which includes spaces and zones which combine rooms into groups.

Good luck!

[james.grahamL3C2C]

For what it's worth, I think that your Unit/Room idea is one worth Autodesk investigating, though it may share some redundancy with MEP 'Spaces'. But maybe the solution to your hypothetical issue is handled more through internal drawing standards. 

At the start of a project, one of my chief concerns is how to minimize/optimize the number of unit types. In the overall plans of the building, the rooms we're creating using the method I described are labeled as their respective unit type (UNIT 1A, UNIT 2D, etc) with their room number beneath in the same room tag. 

So, looking only at the floor plan on A-102, one should be able to deduce that room #245 on level 2 is a Type 1A unit. From there, they can venture over to A-401 to understand what is contained within our Type 1A typical unit. Additionally, they can see a unit schedule to understand there are 150 type 1A units in the project. Depending on how varied your unit mix is, (or how elaborate your units are), you can add/relabel your toilet fixture and bed count to provide that additional information on your unit schedule. 

Again, I understand the broader request of this thread, and it would probably have more utility in a higher-end/BIM 360 environment than what I'm working in. But after working on dozens of multifamily projects ranging from 3 unit townhouses to 500+ unit towers, I've never had a contractor/consultant request unit info beyond what's available in the typical combination of overall floor plan/unit plan/applicable interiors.