Monday, October 03, 2005

When Is A Room Already A Room?

Revit room schedules are unique among other Revit schedules. They allow you to create a new room even though you may not have placed a single wall.

What are the implications of this?

Probably most significant is that you can enter the details of your client’s program into Revit early on, right at the beginning. Yes! Often the province of spreadsheets, you can do programming inside Revit. With the right collection of parameters you can replicate this kind of report inside Revit and as you start to work out the design you can assign these rooms from the program. When you run out of rooms, you’re done, you’ve “hit” the program, at least literally.

Another possibility is that you can set up a typical collection of rooms in your project template(s). Doing so means you don’t have to type them in every time (or at least as many). It might be a subtle attempt to standardize naming? It might be a subtle way to improve productivity and consistency. You be the judge!

If you are a “whiz bang” programmer you can even import the room data from an existing excel spreadsheet to fill out the Revit Schedule using the new Revit API. You can import values like names, the required/desired room area, budget expectation for each room, material requirement, department, occupant, use etc.

Some things to consider!

Oh...sorry...how? Just create your room schedule, when done, notice the NEW button on the options bar while viewing the schedule. A new room is added for every press of the button!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you tell me how to find Revit API? Is it a plug in or it is already built into Revit but under different name? I would love to try out and see how this API works. I read the "questions & answers" section for revit 8. It said that Revit is shipped with first release of API. I wonder if it has an updated version of API in 8.1 release since I have Revit 8.1. I did a search in Revit help and couldn't find anything on API. Thanks.

Steve said...

A question better asked of the few Revit users who also do programming and participate in the AUGI Revit Community forum: Revit API, but I think you already have?

What I do know is that there is a file RevitAPI.chm (help file) that you can browse for a cursory introduction to what it is. It is located in the install directory under Programs. Something like C:\Program Files\Autodesk Revit Building 8.1\Programs

According to Danny and Guy at AUGI it doesn't tell the whole story and it will take some digging and trial/error cycles to get your bearings.

Hope that helps?