Thursday, January 02, 2014

Copy Monitor Walls and Openings

I've mentioned in the past that we need to be careful using the Copy/Monitor (C/M) tool on walls when we use the option Copy windows/doors/openings.


When Revit examines the geometry of the family used to create the opening in the C/M'd wall it looks at the overall geometry to define the opening's size. That's usually not good because trim on the face of the wall does not define the opening required. The stock door families (and windows) are good/bad examples of this in action.

This is an opportunity to bring up another advantage of creating doors like described in A Door's Life, they behave when you use C/M. Why do they behave? There isn't any native geometry in the host door family. The frame, door panel, swing and hardware geometry are all based on nested families and the C/M tool doesn't "see" them when it creates the equivalent opening in the C/M'd wall.

Here's a comparison based on stock and not stock doors, in plan view.


The openings created from the stock doors are as large as the trim elements that surround the opening of the door (3" wide trim). The openings for the not stock doors as as large as the opening in the host family and all the nested components are designed to fit inside the opening that's used in the family. The nestedness of all the components prevents them from being detected by C/M.

Here's the elevation of the same doors.


4 comments:

Unknown said...

I am trying this now in Revit 2016 and it seems to be recognizing the trim in my embedded window and making my C/M opening wider. Has this changed?

Steve said...

That is how it has always worked unfortunately.

As I understand it, speaking with engineers and from an analysis standpoint, the opening size being altered in this way usually minor enough that it isn't important, meaning doesn't alter the ideal size of of header/lintel.

However, for those concerned with the documentation of opening sizes, for example for concrete forms, it isn't a minor issue.

I suspect they were focused on analysis originally and haven't returned to examine the feature since.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the heads up, I was hoping this was the solution. I am using this opening to fabricate walls using StructSoft MWF. Being able to copy the architects model to structure and monitor changes is a great concept, this could have been a great tool. Any further suggestions would be appreciated. I might have to look into writing some similar functionality in Dynamo.

Steve said...

I think an application (API directly or via Dynamo) that places an opening family in the structural model's walls separately based on parameters values for height and width is a good way to go.

Ironically that's what Copy/Monitor is...and the tricky part, the part IT gets wrong, is ensuring that the app is able to find/identify the correct parameters to reference in each door/window family.

Perhaps you can use C/M to create the openings and write an app that fixes their size :)