Autodesk Revit Tutorials, Revit Families, BIM Revit

   
     
     
djdfjdj

Conceptual Design and Early Studies
 

Building Maker
After several iterations and tweaking, the client makes up their mind. One of the solutions is selected to go forward, and you’re ready to convert that early mass into a real building. Here is where the Building Maker tools come into play. With these tools, you can get more detailed information about the model by attaching walls, floors, and roofs to the massing shapes.
This approach has two major advantages over traditional 3D systems:
 
  1. The need to re-create the digital data from scratch is eliminated.
  2. An established connection exists between the building elements made by referencing the mass and the mass itself, so the massing design can iterate and update the building elements.
The nice thing about the Building Maker workflow is that it also supports the import of geom-etry from tools such as Rhino, 3ds Max, and SketchUp into mass shapes, to which you can then attach wall, floors, and roofs
Chapter 6 discussed the principles of modeling, and Chapter 7 analyzed the bases of the mass-ing tools for creation of massing studies. You should have a good understanding of how to create a mass element or an entire mass study. We’ll now focus on the second group of tools located in the Massing tab of the Design bar: the so-called Building Maker tools.

Insert image
Let’s get an overview the available tools and then examine their real-life application
 
Floor Area Faces
The first tool you should know about isn’t visible in the Massing tab. It’s the Floor Area tool, which is designed for getting early square-footage take-offs from the massing. This tool appears in the Options bar whenever a mass that you created is selected.
Assuming you’ve created a mass study in which you define the basic volumes and shapes that will form your building or complex of buildings, you’re ready to start setting up levels. Depending of the type of building you’re making, code regulations, and functional usage, you can begin to lay out levels for the building. Let’s say the maximum height is 90´´ (22m), and your building is a hotel, which will usually have a 12´ (3m) floor-to-floor height. In that case, you can get approximately seven levels.
From any elevation view, add levels using the Level tool. It’s obviously much easier to copy a level graphically using the Multiple Copy or Array command; however, with that method you won’t create actual floor plans for each of the levels. If that’s OK with you, go ahead. If not, you can either use the Level tool and draw each Level or use the copy method to create levels but then create floor plans from those levels by using the View/Floor Plan tool and selecting which levels should have a floor plan view associated with them.
Click the Floor Area Faces button when the mass is selected. You’ll get a list of all levels in the project. If you check all levels, a floor area will be calculated for each level. If you want to skip a level because of double room height, for example, don’t check that level. You can do this for all masses at the same time or separately for each volume.
When you OK the level selection, your mass is sliced by floor (see Figure 8.7).
Imagine that the other masses are for the conference center and parking structures, and apply the same concept. Add levels appropriate for each structure, then select each mass, click Floor Area Faces, and choose which levels you want to slice up the mass.
You now understand why the Level tool is handy on the Massing Design bar. Revit is fantastic because you can add, delete, and reshuffle levels at any moment in your project development with-out needing to redo work or losing any invested work. This slicingof volumes doesn’t just visually help you understand the number of floors and divisions—it also calculates the floor area of the mass element in question and allows you to schedule the values (Figure 8.8).
 
Verifying Your Design and Its Fit within the Defined Program
You can schedule the parameters and values of the masses similar to how you schedule other Revit elements. In the earliest phase of the project, you’ll probably want to schedule the functional zones. To create an understandable schedule, it’s a good idea to give the mass elements you created names according to their function—Hotel Rooms, Conferences, Parking, Restaurants, and so on—and assign them different colors (materials) so it’s easy to visually represent the data. If you need to rename the mass element once it is created you can do that from the project Browser—find the Mass Element in question and rename. As mentioned in Chapter 7, you can also add project parameters to the mass elements, such as Public or Private Space, Department, and so on. If you wish to tag those new parameters so that they are shown in the Mass Tag, you must make them shared param-eters and add them in the Massing Tag family. See Chapter 15 for more on shared parameters.
Out of the box, the mass elements in Revit can report the following properties:
  1. Gross Floor Area.
  2. Gross Surface
  3. Gross Volume
Figure 8.7
Floor areas slice up the mass at each designated level.		  
Figure 8.7
Floor areas slice up the mass at each designated level.		  
If you created an initial mass study and schedule the mass elements, you’ll notice that the schedule reports Gross Surface and Gross Volume of the entire shape (Figure 8.9). You can’t schedule the Gross Floor area without first adding levels and creating floor area faces.
Insert Image
By defining levels and creating floor area faces, you can add a total Gross Floor area to the schedule (Figure 8.10).
Figure 8.9
Example of a mass element without floor area faces		  
Figure 8.10
The mass is sliced into floor area faces.		  
The total gross floor area of the mass is the sum of all the floor slabs belonging to that one mass element. That probably isn’t granular enough for your needs. You need to get separate data about the floor area per floor, probably sorted and grouped by usage/function. To get the floor area per level or at least per function, you need to use the floor element and build a floor schedule. This is due to a limitation of the current massing tools in Revit: The mass alone doesn’t offer the ability to calculate floor area per level or per any other property of the mass without floor elements being added.

Insert Image
To apply floors to the massing, click the Floor By Face tool, select each floor area face of the mass, and then click the Create Floors button in the Options bar.
Firms worldwide have found different ways to solve the problem of calculating a floor area per level. For example, you can create special massing templates in which floor elements are preset and assigned different functional properties and materials based on function. When you come to the stage in the design process where you need to get data about the individual floor area per floor or grouped by function per floor, you apply floors to the floor area slices and make a schedule of the floors.
For compelling graphics, you can give the mass and floor materials a transparency, as shown in Figure 8.11.
Figure 8.11
Transparency and color used to explain programming		  
Follow these steps to use floors both graphically and to drive a schedule:
  1. Select the Floor tool, and go to the Type Properties of Generic Floor.
  2. Duplicate the floor, and name it Offices.
  3. Edit Structure in the Type Properties, giving it a new material that is 50% transparent blue. Set its thickness to 10´ (2.5m)
  4. Give a mark number and comment/description to each floor slab so that later you can sort/group them in the schedule to achieve the desired result.
  5. In the Element Properties (Figure 8.12), set The Height Offset From Level parameter to be identical with the floor height. You do this because the floor is always drawn from the level you choose (in this case, the thirty-third level) downward; to fill the space above the level, you should define an offset of the floor height. Figure 8.13 shows the resulting levels.
  6. Repeat the same for Reception Level, Garages, Conference Center, and Hotel, applying different colors each time.
Figure 8.12
Element Properties—set Height Offset From Level to a positive value		  
This process allows you to schedule the gross surface, volume, and floor area on a per-level and/or functional basis. Additionally, you can produce visual colored diagrams that are great for explaining to the client the spatial organization of the project.
This may sound like an odd workaround, but it’s a great one, and it won’t affect your future workflow. The moment you decide to switch to a real building and start applying walls, curtain systems, and roofs, you can exchange those floor types with normal floors, using the Type Selector and a few clicks of the mouse
Because you can now quickly generate metrics and graphics showing the functional distribution of program elements, you should be able to get feedback on the fitness of the design early on. This will in turn allow you to fine-tune the design and make sure you’re keeping pace with the client’s requirements. Having built a parametric massing model, the elements are all adjustable in size and shape, and any change you make will instantly be reflected in the visual and schedule data.
Figure 8.13
Floor with positive offset value