Discover how to effectively create and manage spaces within your architectural models using Revit's analytical tools. Learn the ins and outs of setting room boundaries, utilizing automatic space placement, coordinating room names and numbers, and managing your models with the use of space schedules.
Key Insights
- In Revit, spaces act as rooms within the architectural model. These are created using the 'Analyze' tab, but must be bounded by room bounding elements like walls, floors, and ceilings.
- Revit allows for automatic placement of spaces, identifying obvious room areas within the model. However, manual cleaning may be required for spaces placed in unneeded areas, this can be done using a space schedule.
- Revit has a feature to automatically coordinate the naming and numbering between rooms in a linked model and the created spaces. However, if spaces exist where rooms do not, the spaces must be manually deleted from the space schedule to reduce file size.
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The next thing I want to go ahead and do is create my spaces. The spaces are important because they act as rooms, and we want to go ahead and use spaces. We don't want two sets of competing rooms.
We want to create these spaces. So I'm going to go to my floor plan here, my plumbing floor plan. And what I can go ahead and do here is under the Analyze tab, I'm going to go to Space.
Now, the problem that I forgot to do is I need to make this link a room-bounding element. So in Revit, there are different elements that are room-bounding: walls, floors, ceilings—those kinds of items.
When we are talking about a linked model, I need to make this linked model a room-bounding element before I can put any rooms or spaces—those kinds of items—in my model. So I'm going to select the linked Revit model. I'm going to go here to Edit Type, and I'm going to check the box for Room Bounding.
So, apply. Then, click OK. Again, that was: select this Revit linked model, Edit Type.
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I want to make sure that the box for Room Bounding is checked. Hit OK. There we go.
I'm going to go here to Space. Now when I drag over, you can see that it's going to the walls and being bounded by those elements. The other thing I want to do here, which is really nice, is actually go to Place Spaces Automatically.
And it's going to look at all the model and determine where there are obvious rooms or spaces and place those in. I'm going to go ahead and place spaces automatically. And it created 73 spaces.
Now, it's not 100% perfect. And you can see up here, it made a little tiny space in this area, which, to be honest, really wouldn’t be used. I wouldn’t identify this as a space traditionally, but we have a way of cleaning that up.
We have our spaces, we have our space numbers. I'm going to go to my second floor and do the same exact thing. So I go into my second floor.
It only created spaces on the view that I was on. So I'm going to go to Space. I'm going to Place Spaces Automatically.
There we go. I'm going to hit Close. Perfect.
Everything there looks good. The other thing I want to go ahead and do is—within Revit—spaces can detect the linked model’s rooms and coordinate the naming and numbering between those. Obviously, we want to match this linked model’s room names and room numbers for our spaces, but we don’t want to have to do it manually.
Well, Revit has put in an automatic way of doing that. Still up here under the Analyze tab, I’m going to go over to where it says Space Naming, and it assigns the names and numbers
From the architectural rooms to MEP spaces used for building performance analysis. And that’s really the difference between rooms and spaces.
Rooms are for the architectural aspect—they don’t have as much analysis capability for building performance. If I click into a space here, you can see I have a lot more parameters here. So I have my constraints.
I have my electrical lighting calculations—ceiling reflectance, wall reflectance, floor reflectance, what I want my foot candles to be, my electrical design loads, what the dimensions are, what the area, perimeter, the unbounded height is, what the mechanical flow is. So in mechanical, what is the CFM of the space, energy analysis, different things in different IFC parameters here.
So what I’m going to do, though, is name these correctly. So I’m going to go over here to Space Naming, Names and Numbers, All Levels. I’m going to go ahead and go All Levels, apply for 132 spaces, and hit OK.
And if I zoom in now, you’ll notice that I have my classrooms. Perfect. I want to go ahead and clean this up.
You’ll notice that some of them didn’t get named or changed. And that’s because a space exists where a room does not. So what I’m going to go ahead and end up doing is go over and actually—while I could go through and manually delete these—there’s a faster way to do that.
I’m going to create a Space Schedule. So I’m going to go up to View. I’m going to go to Schedules > Schedule/Quantities.
I’m going to scroll down and find Spaces. You can even type in up here to search. I’m just going to leave it as Space Schedule.
It’s not going on a sheet or anything like that—it’s just for my working coordination. Schedule building components.
I’m going to go ahead and hit OK. I’m going to scroll down. I’m going to go ahead and find Name.
I’m going to find Level. So, get Level. I’m going to get Number, and I’m going to get Name.
The reason I picked that order is because this is the order in which those parameters are going to be scheduled. So this order does matter. I’m not going to filter by anything.
I’m going to go to Sorting and Grouping. I want to sort them by Level. And then I want to sort them by Number.
Everything else there is good. Formatting is fine. Go ahead, itemize every single instance, and then hit OK.
That’s going to give me my schedule here. You can see I have quite a few. You can see my Level 1, my Level 2.
Now you’ll notice that some of them say things like Classroom, Vestibule, Corridor, Storage—all that kind of stuff. But you’ll notice some of these just say the word Space. These are the ones that got placed where we didn’t actually have a room.
I’m going to go ahead and select these. I don’t want them. I’m just going to click on one of them, hold the Shift button, click on another one to select all those rows, and then just hit Delete. This will delete the nine selected spaces and any associated space tags.
Perfect. So let me do that one more time. I’m going to undo (Control + Z), click on the top one, hold Shift, click on the bottom one, and delete.
It’s going to say, “This will delete the nine selected spaces and any associated space tags.” That’s fine. Hit OK.
And there we go. The only way to remove rooms or spaces from a Revit model—and this is good general information—is to delete them from a schedule. If you delete a space—so let me go to my Level 2 Plumbing view here—
If I delete this space—let’s say this 109 space here—and I hit TAB, select that, and delete it, it’s going to give me a warning: “A space was deleted from all model views but still remains in this project.”
The space can be removed from any schedule or placed back in the model using the Space command. So just by deleting it on the view, what that’s telling me is that it has been removed from the model area but still exists in the project. A lot of times what I’ve seen happen is people go through and delete rooms or spaces and then don’t replace them.
But as a project goes on, those are still in the project and they contribute to the file size. We want to make sure they are no longer there. To do that, I would go here to the Space Schedule that I’ve created.
So see how that Space 109 is now a “not placed” space? That’s because I deleted it and so it has no Level, but it still exists in the project. So I’m going to go ahead and delete that row.
I’m going to go down to where my Level 2 is. I’m going to select those spaces there. I’m going to go ahead and delete them.
Hit OK. And there we go. Let’s go ahead and return back to our 3D view here.
And we’re looking good. We’ve got our architectural model LinkedIn. We’ve got our levels copy-monitored.
We’ve also got our spaces created. And there we go. I’m going to go ahead and save this model here.
And we’ll see you in the next video.
