Announcements
Welcome to the Revit Ideas Board! Before posting, please read the helpful tips here. Thank you for your Ideas!
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Room area calculation in door/window niches

Room area calculation in door/window niches

Idea

 

Doors and windows should have an option to add their niche area to room net area.

 

Why do we need it?

 

We have an official law here in Estonia to calculate the area of a door/window niche if both of these conditions are true: a) sill height = zero, b) opening is higher than 2200 mm. If the door is between two rooms, the niche area is divided between those rooms.

 

I've heard that we are not the only country in Europe to have such law.

 

The workaround right now is extremely frustrating. For exterior walls we basically uncheck the Room Bounding of all the walls and draw room separation lines. For interior walls we create a wall opening on top of a door element with the width as door width and height just a little bit more than level computation height. And then we add room separation line along the wall center line. All of this is completely manual work and we have to do that in EVERY SINGLE PROJECT. Imagine an apartment building with 120 apartments. It takes days.

7 Comments
RobertAGlover
Advocate

Or just use area plans. they are easy, can be locked to walls and doors so they adjust as the design is fine tuned (which by the time your calculating area of doors and windows should be minimal adjustments). This is exactly why the area feature exists. Is there a reason that won't work for you? Seems easier than the process described. Best of luck.

Meelis123
Enthusiast

Obviously areas do not work like that. Try and you'll see.

RobertAGlover
Advocate

Meelis123, Area plans can work like that. I've been using them for over a decade for zone plans and other custom uses other than BOMA. You dictate a boundary (in the doors and windows if needed) and then create areas. It may not be automatic like you requested, but is a workaround. Are you looking for volume? In that case you are correct, it won't work, but volumes in Revit have always been a problem with oddly shaped areas.

 

Area Plan.JPG

 

Perhaps I'm not understanding what your goal is.

Meelis123
Enthusiast

I do not know how you created this area so that it calculates the door niche. What area type does that? That does not solve the problem though.

 

So I have walls and I have rooms, but in order to get the door niche area I have to manually create area boundaries for every room in the building? It's like hundreds and hundreds of rooms. Well, what if I have decided to do just that. So areas represent rooms now, what's the point in room tool then? So let's drop the room tool completely and use areas instead. Can I have a door schedule with "from area" and "to area" parameters? What about level computation height? What about deleting some walls or changing floor plan layout, does areas automatically update? Well not exactly, you end up having lots of "Line is too short" and "Area is not in a properly enclosed region" warnings.

 

No, areas by any means do not replace rooms.

RobertAGlover
Advocate

You are correct, areas do not replace rooms, and there is some calculation work that needs to be done. However, to your original request/suggestion to be able to calculate area to include niches, this does work. I am not saying that areas would replace rooms. The workflow I would suggest, is use rooms for 99% of your work, then when you get down to calculating areas of openings and niches (minimal area difference from the room area), you use areas. I assume this would be at the end of the project for permits, or other similar functions. At that time, when the design is pretty much complete then you can use the area lines as an additional service and align/lock them to the walls/doors. So unless you delete a wall or door it should remain with them as they move. Again not ideal. My point is that since a workaround (as unfriendly as it is) exists, Autodesk is highly unlikely to recode the way rooms work. Hopefully this gives you an option for workaround in the meantime.

sonicer
Collaborator

Now there is no possibility get all niche from room to total area.
Only if you use room separator but it's really horrible.
I also looked for some solution. But find nothing. Then I created own solution as Perfect tools plugin for Revit.
Here is the plugin that do it. All door niche is add to floor and also added to room family as net-area parameter.

For windows niche and other working on;)

 

perfect tools -floor generator

esatis
Advocate

Agreed!

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Submit Idea  

Autodesk Design & Make Report