Monday, October 14, 2013

Where did these Rooms Come From?

When you examine the Options Bar while the Rooms command is active you may find something like this image.


Rooms in that list are "Not Placed" but we (someone) may have created them by placing a room and then deleting them later. They could also be left over from when the project template was created, rooms that were created along the way but not eliminated before turning the template over to the project teams. Rooms are to be managed with schedules. We have final control over the reality of a room there. If we don't want them in the list on the Options Bar we can either place them where they should go in the model or delete the room's row in the schedule.

Deleting a room in a floor plan does not remove the room from the Revit database permanently. Deleting one from a schedule does. This allows us to move a room to another location or another floor without recreating the information. I can delete a room on the second floor (in a plan view) and then use the "Not Placed" record of this room to put it where it should go on a different floor. If I decide I don't really need a room I can just open the schedule and delete it for good.

For some background, Revit allows us to create a list of rooms prior to any actual walls defining where they could go. Imagine having a meeting with the client and they give you a list of rooms they want or need. You can create a basic room schedule with number, name, and area for example. Then each time you click the New button in the Row panel Revit generates a new "Not Placed" room. Repeat and fill in information until all of the project's program information is entered. Now as users create walls the room are "waiting" to be placed where they should go.

By the way the same things are true for the Area and Space elements.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve, from my experience, if a project file contains thousands of Not Placed rooms (which is very easy if you have high rise tower and you constantly delete rooms on plan and forgot to remove it from schedule...), the model tend to become very slow, as sometimes we might trigger something that cause Revit to search or react with those Not Placed room... things will get worse if some of the Not Placed room residing in Design Options...

My recommendation is always to get rid of Not Placed room... do you agree?

Steve said...

I'd say it depends on what's going on at the time. If the designers are going through a major shuffling of spaces after a meeting with the client then deleting rooms that aren't placed is begging for angst.

On the other hand if the design has settled down and you are into routine documentation tasks and there are still hundreds of unplaced rooms then it's probably safe to get rid of them.

What's important is that somebody who is well informed about the program requirements is routinely keeping a watchful eye on not only what is visible in plans (belongs there) but what is "unplaced" in schedule (no longer relevant).

Rahul Shah said...

Agree with Steve.

I would advise to include this as part of "QC Schedules" to check on a weekly or fortnightly basis.

Unknown said...

is there a way for the schedule to lead me to a particular room on the plans?

Steve said...

Select a row, click Highlight in Model on the ribbon