Automatically pull location boundaries from Revit rooms to Sheets

[sfedak]

Currently, you can import rooms from a Revit model as locations in the project, which is great. However, you have to manually draw the location boundaries for each "location" on each sheet. This is very time consuming. It would be great if the ACC pulled the room boundaries right from the model and automatically applied them as locations in the project on every sheet in which that room is shown. This way, when you create issues, you can just click on a point in the room on any sheet and it knows what "location" your in. 

[Chad-Smith]

I've recently had to deal with the manual placement of Locations on Sheets... again. Of all the tasks on ACC, this one if it can be automated further would save considerable time.

Currently, there appears to be three reasons holding this back, depending on which direction the user wants to go.

• Sheets doesn't support Revit published Sheets, should the user want to skip PDFs and publish directly to ACC.
• Sheets cannot be linked to a model in Files, in the same way as a PDF stored in Files can.
• If the user is using PDFs, then ACC would need to support Revit Rooms as elements.

Since Sheets currently only support PDFs I'll focus on that workflow. Here is what I had been thinking this past week about how this feature could be implemented.

1. The model viewer would first have to support Revit Rooms as elements. We need this feature anyway for better model navigation, but it would also assist in the definition of Location Areas.
2. We also need the ability to link (underlay) a Sheet (from Build) into a model (in Files). The separation of Sheets from Files causes numerous limitations, which if addressed would start to close those feature gaps.
3. If we can get a 'dumb' PDF in Sheets linked over to a 'smart' model in Files that supports Room elements, we can now align the PDF in the model, and at the correct level, thereby creating a spatial relationship.
4. We should now expect that the Revit model's Room boundaries can be automatically mapped back over to the corresponding Sheet as Location Areas.
5. I appreciate that while we might want all Area boundaries to be mapped, the Location data we still might want to manually control in the Locations list, such as different naming for on-site purposes. But if we could at least get the Area boundaries mapped, that we could then manually link to our Location names, that would be a huge time saver since we are not needing to manually draw the actual Areas.

Until ACC can fully support reliable Revit Sheet publishing, we are still reliant on PDFs. The above is the closest that I can think of to assist with an otherwise painfully slow process.

[membrec]

I'm not going to comment on the rest of the discussion here, but sheets can be published from a model to Build>Sheets now. The .rvt file has to be stored in Files first. Then you can publish from Files to Sheets.

[Chad-Smith]

Thanks Chico for the clarification, that is certainly correct.

Unfortunately, that workflow is also limited by other factors such as not supporting IFC models for a complete drawing.

[jhijlkema]

Definitely agree that this needs to be incorporated. In TakeOff you can already link 3d model elements and the sheets ( when using Revit). Revit Rooms is also a ' physical' boundary in the model, so I hope this won't be too hard to develop. 

[wrabe]

What if a room/area schedule were available OOB that could incorporate the hierarchy, Names/Numbers (per our formatting), and also even the bar codes. There has to be a way to link those to Revit Published Sheets. If the schedule and parameters are OOB then the parameter GUID would always match and programmers could probably make it work.

Heck even allow me to pull in a .shp file that could be created in AutoCAD from a layout exported from Revit with room boundaries. That would at least eliminate the hand drawing of every single room. I’d even be okay with having to place two reference points like you do when aligning a sheet to a model.

[m.hoper9DMVY]

This would be a massive time saver

[andrell.laniewicz]

I'm getting this as a major request from Architecture clients using Build - especially for punchlists 

[jesse_moore279PB]

I'm for it, but this can be tricky for a few situations....   It would be a nice to only sense rooms/spaces that have been tagged on the sheet.   And at a minimum it would be a requirement to have a manual override option after the automation. 

if your just swapping out sheets and thinking of keeping 'markers'...  I'm not sure if you want this to auto update items with updated sheets...  but maybe if you did a check with what it was in the parameter, what room/space it was on the sheet, and what it's changing to you can determine if it was overridden...  but you would still need a way to see what it see's it in and what is in the parameter, as you would need to vet the data.  same as you can in Revit....

I say this as rooms/spaces can be used in select situations to purposely break the room up differently than what is shown on the PDF, or even accentually overlap...

[annika.kirsch]

This is the most requested feature in our company. The locations are to be taken directly from the revit model so that they no longer have to be created manually. This manually creation takes a lot of time

[justinY8QKP]

following

[curtisridenour]

the manual process of drawing the locations makes the tool practically useless. very Autodesk to fumble the ball on the one yard line again.

[melinda_hoffman]

Let me pose this question, as a GC/CM or subcontractor....if the locations/rooms come from publishing the sheets from Revit to the Sheets module only....are you going to then publish the architects model for your sheets in your hub or is it assumed after the publish and share the sheet pdfs (contract drawings) to you that that data is embedded?

[jhijlkema]

The pdfs are the contract drawings. that is what we use in sheets. Ideal state the contract drawing comes iwth a contract model. that is not the case though. If you could map after the fact and verify against contract documents, that would be best. 

[melinda_hoffman]

That was my assumption too, but its important to remember that. Often people forget that the pdfs are the contract and publishing your own sheets from a designers model can be a liability if you are working in a live environment.  Thank you!

[curtisridenour]

@melinda_hoffman you are assuming the only use of Locations is during construction. We want to use them for preconstruction, design and construction. No matter the liability, this is silly. Why not have an automated process that an administrator could control and use for their project needs?

[melinda_hoffman]

@curtisridenour Absolutely not disagreeing at all.  I just wanted the clarification for our development team who are not end users to understand that caveat.  I understand the ask as an SME and coming from 21 years in the industry.  

[curtisridenour]

@melinda_hoffman My 16 years of experience with Autodesk software leads me to believe that this is possible and that y'all just need the right incentive to actually add this function. What would Autodesk need to see our need? 

[wrabe]

From the GC side I create a clean set of floor plans with ONLY walls, doors, and room information for mapping locations so that ALL issues can be shown on a single sheet that is not cluttered with architectural notes.