Shared Parameters in Rooms

[Anonymous]

UK based content. 

I'm trying to get rooms to report a base finish material with spec clauses to a room schedule.

Rooms will be used to quantify areas of floor (base) finish (hard landscape surfaces in this case) & I have tried adding the NBS Ref & Description_mtrl shared parameters to my rooms within the project parameters. I have added a new Base Finish param (material) to my rooms from a shared param & that is working ok, I can use that to access my materials palette. I can't get the spec ref _mtrl params to 'take' the info from my materials palette into the room tag despite those params actually being present in the instance params. 

Room would be placed using Room Sep lines to avoid 3D modelling at early RIBA stages. My landscape team will then be able to use the customised room schedules alongside colour fill legends to very quickly denote finishes, areas thereof etc.

The _mtrl parameters normally work fine with all other objects where I can use the custom parameters in the Materials palette & add the fields manually while reading from the linked NBS Create spec - when those materials don't already have linked spec data. Its a process we use a lot & it works very well. 

But it won't work with rooms & I'm wondering what I'm missing, if anything, or whether Revit won't let me do it. 

FI, I'm working in Revit 2016 for editing/creating family content so that some of our older projects will be able to use the workflow. I'f I have to up date to 2019 for any updated functionality then I will if I have too.

I'm trying to work this up as an alternative to our usual process of using floor type of HL finishes. We're very familiar & capable with that method. Filled regions are cutting it for when we need to provide areas in a schedule. 

Cheers

[SteveKStafford]

Can you share a small mock-up project that shows what you've done so far?

[ToanDN]

Because a material parameter needs physical elements to apply to. Room is not a physical but a spatial element.

[Anonymous]

It shouldn't matter that the room is spatial, as a shared param is a shared param. I can assign a material param to the room & am able to change the material easily. 

I can place any parameter I want into the rooms, I've got a bunch of them set up for various workflows. Its getting some sort of automation using NBS create from the room information. Revit just won't play ball which is pretty ridiculous if you ask me. I'd like to be able to place any of my NBS shared params into a room. There are 2 particular NBS _mtrl params available from Create - these associate with the materials in the model & relate to the product clauses. We use them on all of our system families - for example an ext wall build up will consist of its system outline spec refs, each 'layer' within that wall build up will have 2 _mtrl NBS spec clauses assigned to them (the spec ref & the spec description) I want to be able to have that same flexibility in my 'rooms' so that the landscape team can use the 2 _mtrl parameters to assign their hard surface spec clauses to either a new shared parameter in the rooms or even simply by allowing them to use the params in a room (hard finishes) schedule. 

[SteveKStafford]

You can create a parameter of type: Material and assign it to room or space categories but that is merely a place to store a value for each room/space. It does not extract a material from elements in the model regardless of whether it is within a room/space or not. Those elements have their own material possibilities. If you want to add the material of an element within a room to the room's own data it will require either be manual data entry or some manner of API use (code/Dynamo).

As I mentioned earlier, a small mock-up would give more insight into what you've done and what you might hope to do.