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Friday, September 2, 2011

Revit Tip - Phasing - Demo Existing and New Room Names

Labels: demolition views and room names, revit phasing, revit rooms, revit tip, revit tutorial

I posted a few days ago about some frustrations I was having with the Rooms and phasing of Revit. Well, turns out a simple change of my thought process on Phasing helped out a lot... Thanks to a comment by a reader named Marty M!

First, we must remember that Room's exist on the phase they were placed on. That is to say, whatever phase your view is set to when you place a room, that is the room's phase.

Second, your project should have a minimum three phases (as opposed to the Autodesk template of only two): Existing, Demolition, and New Construction. I say minimum because this is all based on the project. You may have more than three. ***EDIT*** DEMO IS NOT A PHASE!!

Build your existing building and add all the room names in the Existing Phase.

Now that you have all three phases set up and views for each phase. Everything that you demolish should be demolished on the "Demolition" Phase... Not the "New Construction" Phase. This is where my mind set had to change a bit. I had always set the "Phase Demolished" to "New Construction" and I think it was due to the Revit Template only started with two phases. **Note** When using the Demolition "Hammer" from the tool bar make sure you are in the Demolition phase view. The hammer sets the elements demo phase to whatever view you are in. ***

Finally, in your Demo floor plans... Set the phase to "Demolition" and set the phase filter to "Show Previous + Demo"... Go back to your Existing floor plan with the room names and select all the Rooms... (Not the Room Names... you want to select the blue squares). Copy to your clipboard, and paste the Rooms into your demolition view.

Tah dah! Now you have your Existing Room names in your Demo views...

Of course, the one caveat is that you are managing two sets of Existing Rooms.

Comments (11)

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david · 708 weeks ago

think of phasing in terms of time (i.e. 2010, 2012, etc.). thinking of it in these terms eliminates the creation of unnecessary phases. That being said, Demolition makes no sense as a phase. for example, let's say you are doing an addition to a building. the existing building was built in 2005. new construction begins in 2012. the existing building would be on phase 2005. any new construction would be on phase 2012. any demolition work would obviously be to something on phase 2005. when you 'hammer' the object to be demoed it is basically changing the property of the object to be demoed at a certain phase. In this case, the object would be demoed on phase 2012.

1 reply · active 708 weeks ago

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TheRevitKid 72p · 708 weeks ago

David,

That is how I used to think about Phasing... and I think you are right in thinking that way. But, each phase should have a similar Demolition phase just before it... Otherwise your demo plans will show New Construction room names as opposed to existing room names...

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Luke · 708 weeks ago

What about just making a Existing plan view with Rooms and Room Tags shown, and overlaying that on 'top' of your Demo plan on the sheet. That way you can keep just two phases. http://whatrevitwants.blogspot.com/2011/08/demo-i...

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Michael · 708 weeks ago

Having a separate Demo phase is definitely not the way to do it. It is a work around for the existing rooms problem but raises further issues.

What happens when you place a new door into an existing wall? It demos that part of the wall in the same phase as the new door was placed. If you have a separate demo phase before the new door was placed then that demolished wall won't show up in your demo drawings because it wasn't yet demolished in that phase.

1 reply · active 708 weeks ago

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TheRevitKid 72p · 708 weeks ago

That is a great point... Which brings me back to my original thoughts of how to demo things... We have made a full circle... Damn.

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Dan · 676 weeks ago

I too create a Demolition Phase, but I actually use it for temporary containment partitions (dust barriers). I do have problems with doors removed from existing walls, as Michael mentions. I simply do graphic override to achieve the graphics I want. Not perfect, but it meets my needs. It seems that there is no silver bullet for complex phasing.

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Lori · 675 weeks ago

You should not create a demo phase. Demolition can happen in any phase. You'll definitely have issues if you go down that road. If you have access to the Autodesk Univeristy archived classes, I would recommend looking at Michael Massey's class on phases and options for the fundamentals.

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hal · 643 weeks ago

I've found introducing a demo phase to be a bad idea. It introduces a barrier between phases which really messes with the phase filters.

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Riot · 507 weeks ago

In my opinion you have to create a demolition phase because unfortunately revit does not work the way you want it to, if you do your demo in your new work phase but have it set to "show previous + demo" and you make demo elevations or sections, those section tags will all show up in your "show previous + new" filter, so in lieu of hiding all those tags in each view each time its easier to just create a new phase for each one.

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pmartini4 4p · 481 weeks ago

I would advocate for what Luke proposed. I too used to create a third demolition phase, and the great majority of people I know do it because on the surface it seems like the thing to do. However, as many have already pointed out, the software was not intended to work with this way. I began changing this workflow at a previous firm, pointing out the redundancy in creating a separate phase, a separate set of room boundary lines, etc., You also have the graphical issues to work with, particularly with openings/voids/infills across phases. The phasing filters only work one phase backward, and now you have an intermediary phase that can create problems.

The most Revit-friendly way that I have found to work with this issue is to simply have two phases (assuming there aren't multiple phases that the drawings need to be broken up into): Existing and New Construction. Simply duplicate a view from the Existing phase that only shows Rooms and Room Tags, and then overlay that view over your other view which is in the New Construction phase set to Show Previous + Demo with Rooms turned off. This way, if your rooms for whatever reason change in the Existing phase (say the record drawings you got were wrong and you update the plans after doing some field verification, which is often the case), your demolition drawings are updated automatically.

I've also seen people use dummy tags, but this loses the automation that Revit could provide.

One setback to this is that if you have a separate set of views for exporting purposes (i.e., CAD backgrounds for consultants), you will have two x-refs for the demolition drawings: the plan view and the room tag view. Just give them a heads up, and you should be okay.

Kind of a bummer situation, but this has proven for me to be the best way to show existing room names in the demolition drawings.

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pmartini4 4p · 481 weeks ago

As for Riot's post, all you have to do is create a new view type and then assign filters to your proposed drawings to remove all references to the demo drawings. The intended workflow is to create multiple view types and create filters.

For example: you have two view types, one called Building Section and one called Wall Section. In your overall plans, you would want to show both sections, but perhaps in your enlarged plans you only want to see wall sections. In that case, you assign a filter to your overall plans to not show the Building Section.

More specifically, you can create demolition view types and simply filter them out your proposed work views.

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Friday, September 2, 2011