show existing rooms in "show previous and demo" phase

[Anonymous]

Can you please address why new rooms show up in lieu of existing rooms when"show previous and demo" are set for the phase filter?  Every single other existing element including doors, walls, windows, etc. show in the "show previous and demo" phase filter with the exception of rooms. Thank you.

[David_W_Koch]

Rooms only exist in the phase in which they are created.  If your demolition plan is set to show the "New Construction" phase (substitute whatever you are calling your phase for "New Construction") and the view is set to show "Previous and Demolition", you will get the rooms associated with the "New Construction Phase", along with all items demolished in the current phase (with the demolition phase filter applied) and, with the existing phase filter applied, all items that were created in previous phases - but not rooms.  Existing to remain rooms could be copied from a plan view of the previous phase and pasted to the same location to a plan view of the "New Construction" phase.

Showing room names of rooms being demolished in demolition plans is more of a challenge.  One way would be to create another plan view for the same level, with the same cropping (if any), set to the phase before the "New Construction" phase, and adding room tags only to rooms that will not exist in the next phase.  Turn off the display of all items except those room tags, then place this view on the sheet with that area's demolition plan, aligning it with the demolition plan view (which lacks the rooms to be removed).  It is a bit more work to set up and, if there are changes, perhaps a little fussy to maintain, but it is better, or at least more BIM-like, than creating a dummy annotation family that looks like your room tag and manually entering the room name and number.

[Anonymous]

David,

Thank you for the reply. I've seen this workflow before on Revit Kid's website http://therevitkid.blogspot.com/2011/09/revit-tip-phasing-demo-existing-and-new.html
I was curious why we have to create this hack. I'm totally confused why Revit would show "new rooms" when it shows existing everything else. If I have existing rooms, revit should show existing rooms rather than new rooms on the "show previous and demo" phase filter. Autodesk probably won't address and fix, so it may be just a rant at this point, but I wanted at least to bring it to Autodesk attention that this is a serious flaw in the program.

Thanks David,

Bill

[David_W_Koch]

I understand your pain. I cannot say I fully understand the logic behind it, but I am told that Rooms do not work with Phasing. The only rooms available are the rooms created in a given phase, unlike constructed objects (walls, door, etc.), which can exist across phases, from phase of creation to phase of demolition.

[CoreyDaun · Accepted solution]

Rooms and Spaces do not possess a "Phase Demolished" parameter, and thus are not subject to the Phase Filters. I think it would be a problem if Rooms did exist across multiple Phases; because the boundary of a Room is typically determined by the walls around it, how would Revit determine the boundary of said Room if the walls have been demolished in one phase and new walls constructed in a new phase? A Room could have two completely different boundaries between Phases.

As an addtion to David's tip about creating and overlaying a dedicated View for existing Room Tags, you can use "Hide Element" on the "Room Tag" Viewport to make it unselectable and to hide the View Tag - the contents of the View will still print normally. This will prevent a user from accidentally activating the "Room Tag" View instead of the Plan View.

[MKFreiert]

as to why we "have to do this":
when you show previous phase, you are not actually showing the entirety of that phase, you are showing what remains of that phase in the current phase. if you want to show the rooms from phase 1, your view would need to be set to phase 1. if you want to see the rooms from phase 1 while you're looking at phase 2, you're in effect asking to see both demolished AND new AND existing at the same time for those two phases.  show all somewhat accomplishes that, but not with phase specific items.

model elements which occur within the phase a view is set to is what is displayed within it.    now, i could see having rooms that are demolished be shown, but rooms don't exist across phases.  while it *could* be possible for revit to track rooms across phases, as soon as any one element of the bounding of that room changes it would now be a new room, or the room would need to adapt/change/combine with another room, which would introduce myriad logic issues

from an end user standpoint imagine adding a vestibule to a room and having to renumber the room, it'd be maddening, at the same time the room as a *concept* remains, the room as an element of a computer model is gone.   in practice, this would get even more complex, as "room 100" may move across the building and serve an entirely different purpose between exsiting and a remodel, and while it would be useful to know that the existing room 100 has that as a number, it is not the same conceptual "room 100" in the next phase.  hence having "room 100" being assigned as the *same room* across two phases makes no sense.  the room 100 in phase 2 is an entirely new and different element id.  even if the envelope of room 100 remains the same, in phase 2 it may be renumbered room 102, so you would have to demolish it, and place a new room.  on any one project several of those conditions typically occur, and having to chase down every room and choose what to do with it would be absurd as no default would work well.

in order to make incredibly complex models function, it's necessary to make some compromises, some of which can be very confusing to end users.  for example, i recently built a very flexible and unbreakable (knock on wood) restroom partition family.  there are dozens of nested logical checks to keep it from doign impossible things and to provide *most* of the functionality that my designers need.  while i'd love to have been able to add a flip for each door swing in an array, this is impossible as families can only have one flip, and nested flip controls dissappear.   my designers "just want it to work" they don't care about the formulas, but they do understand that those formulas are needed to keep the doors from e.g. being wider than the stalls.  likewise, there are some seemingly less than ideal behaviors of revit that can be frustrating when you run into them, but most often these are because we are forgetting that we're building an immensely complex computer model, not just a graphical representation of a building.   

[Anonymous]

So does anyone have a best practice for doing rooms on a multi phase project where there will be more than one construction phase?  I am debating between making a 'names only' view for each previous phase, or just copying alll the rooms from each phase to the last phase and do all my room scheduling in the last phase.  Leaning toward the former because I will have to make sure the rooms are good in two phases.  Now that I've talked through that it sounds like a great way to introduce errors...major errors...

The other wrench in the works is that we had presentation plans that used rooms for coloring different areas of the building and now those don't work due to rooms not showing across phases.  Any links to blogs/etc. on the subject would be appreciated.

[Anonymous]

You said that you can copy rooms from one plan to another....HOW?  I have tried copying to clipboard and I still cannot get the room names to show up.  At this point all I can do is create a dummy room tag. Unless you can give me some additonal advice on how to get them to show up.

[David_W_Koch · Accepted solution]

Are you copying both the Rooms and the Tags in one operation?  I had no problem copying Rooms and Tags from an Existing Phase view and then pasting them in a New Construction View (to the same location) and having the Rooms and Tags show up.  If you copied just the Rooms, you could always add Tags to them, rather than delete the Rooms and then do the clipboard copy over again.

[ryukyo]

I tried simply copying and pasting between phasing, but all the room numbers change. Why does this happen?

[MKFreiert]

because the rooms you placed are different "rooms"

when you copy a floor and paste it to the same location (e.g. copying the demo floor covering to the new phase to be the new floor covering after you change it from vct to new carpet) it is a new critter.

see my post above.  a "room"  conceptually is the relationship of multiple elements, which can be lines(actually planes that are poorly represented), or building elements (walls, ceilings etc) that confine a volume.    

when time (phase) changes *any* of those in the project, the totality of each of those relationships is in effect reset.

bisecting a room (room 100) with a divider wall , the concept of the original room is now gone, even though the walls remain.  likewise the room across the hall which doesnt change (room 101)  may remain room 101, or it may now be 103, or 102 because the relationship it had to the building as a whole has changed.  

you are still your parents child when they have second kid, but now you're their oldest child.  nothing changed about you conceptually, but you now have additional relationships you didn't before.   

in terms of how to number rooms from other phases, i generally don't if i can avoid it, with a "see phase x"  or "room x shown for reference" because it only creates confusion for the construciton team, which is who we're trying to communicate with.   if room 100 dissappears in phase2, and becomes room 102 and room 104, there is little to no guarantee that it got the right (or any) signage in phase 1, so denoting it in phase 2 is moot.  its walls show as existing, so (one hopes) the framing guys can figure out which physical walls refer to which existing walls on the plans.

i will now hold off on abusing this deceased equine for a bit.

[BIMologist_]

As DAvid mentioned.

Here is a How to we have in our office

[seanemd]

This is maddening.  If the bounds of a room don't change across phases, the room itself should remain across phases and not need to be copied and retagged with a new number.  Rooms and room tags should only force recreation/retagging in a phase if their bounds change in that phase.  

How are you supposed to communicate with clients and contractors if you can't tag any rooms until design is complete or you can only tag rooms in the new work phase?

[Base12]

All of this is solved by Autodesk adding the phase characteristic to the room object in the guts of the program.  The "Demolished" wall does exist, obviously since we can see it in the Demolition Phase, so why not be able to have it maintain the boundary of the room that it contains?  This seems like an oversight in the development of the phasing concept, the repair of which would allow the full funtion and annotation of phasing.  Why have phasing at all if 1/3 of the work is impossible to properly annotate?

Laborer:                        "What are we doing today, boss?"

G.C.                              "Remove all of the fixtures in Office-27"

Laborer:                        "Ok, uh, which one is Office-27"

G.C.                              "Look at the Proposed Plans"

Laboror:                        "We're the demo team, we only have a copy of the demolition plans"

G.C. (Calling architect)   "Hey, we need room names on the Demolition plans so my guys know where the work is happening"

Architect:                       "Sorry, you only get room names on the Proposed plans"

G.C.                               "Are you !@#$'ing kidding me?"

Architect:                       "Nope, but you're welcome to call Autodesk and share your sentiments with the Revit team"

G.C.                               "Ok crew, go home for the day until the Architect can figure out how to use his software"

Architect:                       "G.C., you're fired"

G.C.                               "Laborer, you're fired"

All in unison:                  "Autodesk, you're fired!!"

[Anonymous]

beating a dead horse has the benefit of a defined and stationary target and only requires a single tool.

[mastjaso]

HOW IS THIS NOT FIXED YET? 

It's 2016 Autodesk. Get it together. This is one of many unforgivable bugs. This would probably take what? A week of programming and testing time? Maybe a month? Meanwhile it's costing the AEC industry easily months - years in lost time considering every single firm is fighting with this. 

[AaronEllsworth]

I know I'm bumping an old post, but the problem is still relevant.  I see two pieces of functionality that need to be added by the Revit developers. A room should have a demolished in phase, just like other pieces of the model, and you should be able to change the created in phase just like other pieces of the model.

[MKFreiert]

except that a room doesn't exist without the bounding elements, each of which can have their own phase.  

what you're asking for would require that each room bounding element would have a room boundary that goes both forward and backward outside of it's construction and demolition phases, and that each room would have a node/origin that would extend to any bounding element.  if i demo a wall between conference room a and b revit would put multiple rooms in the same volume.  

this would further become a huge nightmare when you actually try to place a room in a remodel where you've demo'd old walls which would divide the new room.  you'd have to demo room bounding wall's room boundary at a different phase than the partition itself.

copy and paste is *not* the end of the world.  you can select all elements in project or view.   even if you DO have more than a handful of phases you need to chase rooms through your project on any of the solutions proposed would make things much worse rather than better.

the only way i can see rooms pushing across phases is for the room to detect the start and end phase of each of it's bounding elements, and include itself in phases where ALL of the elements in the room are the same.  even then, that will cause undesired behavior when a room gets a new use in a new phase, and has to be demo'd discretely from its bounding elements.   further if it DID persist, and you wanted to paint the room in say phase 2 room finish schedule, revit would have no way of understanding that it occurred in phase 2.   (now revit material paint having a phase, i can get behind)

case in point, i'm doing a simple tenant build out study of a warehouse/office space at the moment.  of the (10) rooms in the existing building, none of them will retain the same name in the buildout, making them entirely different "rooms" in revit in the new phase.  (8) of them will not change their volume or walls, but will have different uses, some will get paint or carpet cleaning, and they'll be different "rooms" even the existing water closets which are going from gendered to unisex.

seriously folks, "rooms" in Revit are not the physicality of conference room b or the north end of the cafeteria.  they're a way to discuss the extents of a particular volume at a particular point in time.  if you want to talk about office 102 last week, and the same office when the hallway to it has changed, you have to remember that intellectually we know that time has shifted, but from a revit database standpoint, that has to be spelled out.

in some cases it would be handy to have rooms propagated. i can see it being useful to have them able to  link across phases to "themselves" IF they had absolutely no changes, but something almost always changes.  

zombie horse beaten back down again.  

if you're pondering thread necromancy, please, go back, and read, then re-read my prior posts on this thread.  i feel like a broken record.

[spgeorge]

I can understand the room or space being able to change phases because what if the rooms don't change physically with walls but they are re-numbered to fit a new sequence. 

They should at least make rooms/spaces respond to the phase filters for previous, demo and new. If you create the room in "existing" and the walls are demo'd in "new construction" the room doesn't disappear from the model does it? It still is bound to the existing walls when you view it in an existing phase. All that has to be done is when the phase is set to "new construction" but the phase filter is set to "previous + demo" it shows the previous phase's room or space instead of the new or current phase. When does anyone show the new room names and numbers when in a demo plan?

[MKFreiert]

it doesn't dissappear from the model no, however rooms have some display quirks.   room fills and room tags are tied to the view "Phase", not "Phase Filter" like most things.  This sort of makes sense, as they can only exist in one phase, unlike most things that have the ability to exist across multiple phases.

the utility i can see in having them discrete from the physical elements being shown in a phase filter is that it allows you to step back and review how future space is utilized by room relative to prior wall placement.  I think I've used that twice in over a decade of revit use.