Remove minimum room dimension

[eric.stimmel]

Please consider removing the minimum room dimension. Currently rooms cannot be placed in a bounded area where one of the dimensions is less than ~11". Rooms are often used to calculate areas of shafts and chases and in certain project types, these areas are often very thin. We also often want to view simplified plans where shafts (and also above ceiling spaces in sections, but that is probably another topic) are just filled in with a solid poche. I think this could be achieved (in plan at least) if we could place rooms in all of those spaces and apply a Color Scheme to them to just color the shafts and chases solid black, however these thin spaces pose a problem there. Rooms that automatically adjust to fill a bounded space are great and could be much more flexible without an arbitrary minimum size. Alternatively a different object type could be created that behaves dynamically like a room, but doesn't have to answer the existential question about how you could possibly call such a small space a room.

Desired functionality:

- Tagging very small rooms like plumbing chases for asset tracking and locations in a building

- Graphically overriding chases and shafts for clean "usable space" diagrams

- Accurately calculating areas of chases and shafts dynamically as the plans evolve

[Anonymous]

Got my vote!

We are forced to change our entire 10000+ rooms schedule into an area schedule just because of this  annoying virtual limitation. Rendering the entire room schedule useless.

Its funny because small room works with a very thick wall boundary, but when you reduce the wall thickness, the minimum area required to be read as room gets smaller.

[Anonymous]

Room minimum dimension is, by Revit default, about 45cm. That is just stupid!

I have a room corresponding to the backgound lawn and another for the area of the wood deck. There is a gap of 30 od 20cm from the deck to one wall or another area separation line. Right now I'm not able to get the room "Lawn" area to be correct as the small gap between the deck and the wall is just ignored. And there is no workarround!

Only way to get the correct area is to use area plans but that needs to be another view, another schedule, another everything!!!

Lock at another ideia that would make a lot of people happy: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/combine-area-plans-with-floor-plans/idi-p/7576459

But for now, just remove the room minimum dimention, pease! Thank you.

[grahamcook]

The detection of Room and Space boundaries has a 1ft tolerance meaning that small tight spaces, those that run into tight corners, islands that are 1ft or less from an external boundary, nooks and crannies, etc will not return an accurate boundary.

A solution would be to have an option to override that tolerance (lower the tolerance) on selected rooms / spaces and would result in more user control and less compromise on trying to get boundaries represented correctly.

A case was raised (REVIT-127340 [API space boundary differs from UI -- 13927409]) that clearly demonstrated the tolerance issue relating to rooms with more than one loop.  Link to Forum Article here.  In response to that case, the Revit Software Architect Tamas Badics said:

“Nothing really to fix here, except the old problem of the 1ft tolerance. That has been reported numerous times and is waiting in our backlog to gather enough support.”.

Here is a link to a similar case that is also asking for more control over the tolerance:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/remove-minimum-room-dimension/idi-p/7233742

[grahamcook]

Here's a link to a similar request that relates more to the API than the User Interface but I think its the exact same issue.  Vote for that as well.  The more support this gathers the more likely something will be done about it!

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/lift-the-1ft-tolerance-relating-to-room-and-space-boundar...

[tamas_badics]

Hi Everyone,

Here is a bit of background on this issue from inside the factory (I wrote the code back in the mid 2000s): 

The current room calculation algorithm artificially sets all wall widths to 1.004 ft (the wall's center line is offset to each side by 0.502 ft). This was a conscious decision in Revit 7.0 to avoid complications. As a result the "inflated" walls will hide small areas where the two opposite bounding walls are closer than 1.004 ft apart at their center. Similarly, if a wall is thicker than 1.004ft, Revit may detect channels where there is none.

Once the room circuits are detected using the artificial (red) boundary curves, we reconstruct the actual room's boundary by offsetting the red curves to the real wall faces and connect/trim the consecutive room boundaries to form a tight area. That is the area we show the user when a room is selected. That is also the area that is used by area value calculations. (In this image, the artificial walls are drawn in red)

.

There is also an added complication caused by the need to close small gaps automatically if the room is not completely closed. 

All this is "fixable" by only carefully rewiring the algorithm to deal with actual wall cross-sections. So the real fix is not a simple matter of modifying the tolerance.  

The cost of the right fix is a bit high and the current method works VERY reliably. This is why we have not jumped on it yet. Of course, if this "idea" gathers enough support, that may tilt the priorities for us. 

[eric.stimmel]

@tamas_badics, thanks for the background! It's incredibly gratifying to know that our ideas and requests are being read by the development team and always interesting to get an explanation about how things work or why certain decisions were made. I never assume these things will be easy (although I admit to often hoping they are ) and it's great to have a forum where we can lay out our case. Hopefully the support for this one will come - I think it would make Revit better.

[Anonymous]

Hi @tamas_badics, I also really apreciate you comming here and answering us. At least we get to know that we are heard.

That's why I would like to give another input/sugestion, hoping that just maybe it could provide a easier solution (I have no idea...).

Do you think it would be possible to end the hole "area plan" separation of information? In the beguinning I used rooms to my plot plan areas, with filters, until I discored this little problem and end up using an area plan. If I take that decision midway, I have to remake all the view editing. If area lines are like model lines, couldn't we see/use them in a normal view plan? I can't see the use in having separate plan view... This way, most small spaces could be scheduled, though in a diferente table, but still, it would be something...

I would really like this improvement, because of the first situation, but I think a lot of other people would too. 😉

Thank's for "listening" again! 🙂

Looking forward to hear your thoughts on the matter.

[tamas_badics]

@Anonymous, I think there is another Revit idea with with Area Plans that looked similar to me. In any case, I think that is a separate "area" for improvement. Lets keep this one for the computation accuracy.  The main benefit of using actual walls to define rooms is that they can never go out of sync with "area curves".

[tamas_badics]

This is the idea about Area Plans: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/combine-area-plans-with-floor-plans/idi-p/7576459 

[grahamcook]

I see, you could argue that getting the room boundary algorithm to work without that tolerance restriction (and thus more accurate) would be a pre-cursor to combining Area plans with Floor plans (ideally).  When I say more accurate, I mean more capable of capturing fringe cases, as i know your algorithm is quick and gives good results 99% of the time!

It just got my Vote.

[eric.stimmel]

I agree with keeping the topic of Area Plans (about which I also have some thoughts) separate. It's important that the area (of Rooms) is calculated dynamically and does not require a person to adjust walls as well as coincident boundary lines. We don't want to lose that or the ability to track arbitrary areas (of Areas) in schedules and on Area Plans in the process of addressing this topic. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks @tamas_badics for the link. I haven't seen that one before. I agree that it is a totally diferent issue, and hopefully both could be adressed some time in the future. And yes, as @eric.stimmel says, in no way we want to lose the ability to create arbitrary Areas defined by especific and independent "model" lines.

[Anonymous]

I have read all the comments in this post and am having difficulty replicating some of the problems.  If we are defining a room with room separation lines, we have similar issues.  However, if we are defining a room with walls, we are able to generate very, very small spaces.  May I suggest that the problem is inconsistency in how Revit treats the bounding element rather than exclusively a problem with size?

[eric.stimmel]

The 11" dimension I'm referring to is from center line of wall to center line of wall. Turn on the visibility of rooms in your view and make the dimension smaller one inch at a time and you'll find the sweet spot where it becomes unbounded.

[Anonymous]

I understand what you are saying.  I was not able to generate the error because for a variety of reasons, our templates are set to calculate rooms to the face of wall, not the centerline.  Which is an entirely different discussion for an entirely new post.  I want a choice by view.  But I digress...

[Anonymous]

Agree on the inconsistency, but only when you are using wall as room boundary, it depends on the wall thickness on how small a room can be. 

But how small a room can be is consistent when you are using room boundary lines as room boundaries.

[ejs]

Hi guys,

please solve it ASAP.

Right now i have a gap of 180 mm where al lthe piping is concealed. I must appoint the location of the piping by room (space, etc) number, not the "intersection of axes X05 and T08".

What I did right now - removed "Wall bounding" property from one of the walls and added a room bounding line at the required location. Dirty trick, but still works 🙂

[Nurlan-A.]

Bump for must fix idea!

[archonplus]

Hey, 

Unfortunately, this problem also occurs for Room Separation Line

It's very annoying when you have to change the whole way of counting space in a project.

[Thewidru]

Hello,

I encountered the same problem and I think I found a workaround if you don't have too many of these situations (sorry if I've got some names wrong, I work with the german version):
Create a project family, take the outline of the troublemaking thinner walls and take the inline, after that and setting the right height you'll have to deselect the roombounding function on the mentioned thinner walls. I found I can place rooms even 1x1 mm
I also put the project family on its own workset, so I can control visibility etc. Maybe that helps a bit?