Filling Interstitial Spaces For Zones

[rvtquestions]

Issue: 

Exploring the best way to "infill" all gaps and interstitial spaces residing between other spaces to create a "watertight" zone that covers a desired portion of a floorplate. In other words, say one applies spaces from rooms from an architectural background and groups them into a Zone. I need that Zone to also include all the interstitial spaces that remain between the other spaces, maybe some are shafts, maybe some are gaps, but primarily my interest concerns the openings in walls such as doors and windows to be included. Why I need this is because there are certain instances when I have families placed in odd locations like within walls, under door frames at all orientations.

What I know:

• I am aware of activating a Family's room calculation point squiggle and defining its calculation point. This however will not always work for me as the orientation of how I place families can vary and therefore the set point will not be dependable.
• I used to set the arch link as "NOT" room bounding and drawing my own spaces across the floorplate which worked great. However, there are times I need to reference the arch rooms and therefore would like to have a solution using the architectural rooms.

Has anyone else encountered a similar scenario? How do you guys deal with spaces like openings in doors between rooms to be accounted? I almost wish there was a way to have the spaces from arch rooms as a "Strong Reference" and drawing another large space that is over all of them as "Not a Reference" to co exist.

[iainsavage]

Not sure what you’re trying to achieve here but maybe this will help: the default in Revit is to measure spaces to the faces of walls etc. If you go to area & volume on the ribbon you can change that to the centreline, so each space will include half of the wall thickness.

[rvtquestions]

@iainsavage 

Thanks for the input. Yes I realize this question is quite particular, but to simplify, being able to extend the space boundaries to a wall center would be a start. When I set the Room Area Computation for "Spaces" to "At Wall Center" it does not work, however, if I set "Rooms" to "At Wall Center" and placed a room in my host model, it will work. Unfortunately, as you know I am ideally looking for Spaces and not Rooms. Anyone else experience the same issue? Any workaround?

[iainsavage]

Sorry that didn’t work for you.

I assumed that if the rooms were to the centreline then the spaces would follow suit.

Regarding shafts, you should fill these as unoccupied spaces:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2020/EN...

Any narrow spaces (sliver spaces) which conform to certain criteria are automatically included in the volume of adjacent spaces, or again you could manually fill them with unheated spaces:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2020/EN...
I still don’t quite get what it is you’re trying to achieve though.

What about, in your families which are inside walls and under doors, include some invisible geometry which extends beyond the actual geometry and therefore brings the extents of the family into the room/space e.g. a lot of families include a “clearance zone” object whose visibility can be controlled by a yes/no parameter but even when not visible it still defines the selectable extents of the family in a model - would that work?

[rvtquestions]

@iainsavage 

I am looking to infill the portion in red as an extension of a space or a new space. I have some reasons as to why I need that with room reporting for some of my families as being one of the factors. As mentioned earlier, there are a few options:

1. I disable room bounding and manually define my own spaces but that is time consuming.
2. I assign a room calculation point to point widely in one direction. This however will not work for me because the placement of my family is not always the same in location, orientation, etc. In order for this to work I would need to create a new family with a custom room calculation point for each orientation since currently we have no parametric control over the point.

While including an element that could grow further than the extents of the default family is a thoughtful idea and could be used for custom scripts (i.e. testing for intersections, testing for points, bounding boxes, etc.), I don't believe this would affect the room calculation of the family even if it extended into a room.

[iainsavage]

Then I'm out of ideas.

Sorry I couldn't help.

Hopefully someone smarter than me might know the answer.