Revit: Creating a Room Group Prototype
The following explains how to create a group of rooms with their embedded properties and relevant room finish schedule to be used as a prototype group. The procedure could be applied for any type of prototypical project, such as a chain of restaurants or retail stores, where you’ll have the same room properties applied over several projects.
All we need to do is create a group of rooms with all their parameters and properties (see Figure 1). The rooms are created with Room Boundary Lines (which will be deleted later on).
Create the group in a new file and save it to the Library as an .rvt file. (Save as > Library > Group). Each room will have its parameters and properties filled in and ready to be loaded in any future project.
Figure 1: All rooms created with boundary lines (to the right) and each having its parameters and properties filled (to the left).
The newly created project can be inserted into the relevant file as a Group (Load as Group command under the Insert menu). Once ungrouped, the rooms can be tagged for easy recognition. The Tag All command will tag all rooms with the Room Tag. Then, each room from the ungrouped group can be dragged into the relevant room space on the plan (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Dragging each tagged room from the Group to the appropriate space on the plan.
Once all rooms needed from the Group are allocated on their relevant places in plan, we can move on to tagging and scheduling. Here, the first issue that will come up is that even though we have a room number already embedded into the Grouped room properties, it might be different than what we need in our current project.
There are two ways to go about numbering. If the room needs a specific non-sequential number, then it obviously needs to be numbered manually, one by one. If, on the other hand, numbering can be different from project to project and non room-specific, then we can simply use the Room Renumbering Plug-in from Autodesk, available for download from
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/ADN_plugins/catalog/
The group with the rooms, tags, and boundary lines can now be deleted to avoid double scheduling.
