Placing Spaces, Ignore SOME Architectural Room Bounding Elements

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I'm placing spaces with the linked Arch model set to room bounding, works fine for most of the rooms. 
But in the open office the architect has placed room bounding lines around every desk, and used artsy room bounding lines in ovals for collaboration areas. Makes placing proper spaces in there impossible. 

If I make the arch link not room bounding, it breaks all the other spaces in smaller rooms that are just fine.

Only solution I've come up with is to trace all the walls with space bounding lines and make the arch model not room bounding. 

PLEASE let me know if there is a better way. 
I'll ask if the architect can make all the weird room boundaries not room bounding in the future, but I bet they're using them for something. 

[iainsavage · Accepted solution]

This is an inappropriate use of room divisions by the Architect and I would say they should be strongly advised not to use this practice and to consider the implications for other disciplines. 
If you are linking a copy of their model I would say open the linked model and delete those room separators.

If you’re linking directly to their live model then unfortunately you might have to live with it.

One option might be to place spaces per their room layout and use an “air partition” between those spaces to allow full thermal transfer from space to space.

Other than that I don’t have any clever suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I'm going to send the architect an email about it. They probably don't know that it added an hour or two to a quick task.

I've never heard of air partitions before. Is that for having Revit do load calcs? Its not common practice to use revit for calcs at my company so I won't be going that route. 

[HVAC-Novice]

room bounding lines aren't really for calcs. A valid use would be where an actual room is separated by another room by not a wall. Think a wall opening without door. Or if you have a corridor that becomes an office and at some point you want a separation in rooms. Or you have an open floorplan for kitchen and dining room and you want to differentiate them. 

One wouldn't use them like in your project. Those work spaces are not separate rooms. 

[iainsavage]

I had assumed you were placing spaces to use for calculations - that is the main purpose of spaces in MEP models as distinct from rooms.

Yes an “air partition” is an invisible boundary between two spaces and has no resistive properties so energy can freely transfer across the boundary.

[HVAC-Novice]

Spaces and rooms can be used for calculations. The bounding lines can't. Rooms also can calculate, just not a lot of MEP stuff. but you could calculate whatever depends on floor area (occupants etc.)

Another feature is you can put multiple spaces in a room with space separation lines. But you can't put multiple rooms in a space. Rooms ignore space separations, but spaces obey both space and room separations. 

An example would be if you have a huge library "room" split into reading and stack "spaces". that way you can have the lighting power density for the separate uses (code has different maximum lighting power density for both).

[iainsavage]

I know all this but thanks.

[RobDraw]

Before there were spaces, open rooms could be divided with room separation lines.

Just an FYI.

[iainsavage]

From autodesk help:

“You can also specify a surface type as air. Use this value when a large room is organized into multiple spaces. The air represents the fictitious face that subdivides the room.”

[HVAC-Novice]

"Room" separators still exist. 

[RobDraw]

How else would you divide open rooms into sub rooms?

[HVAC-Novice]

You spoke in past tense as if this feature was removed. It is still there. 

[RobDraw]

Really?