How to create interior elevations, plans and a sheet for every room in Revit

The problem

A room sheet is made of many views, and each one has to be created, cropped, given a template and a scale, and placed. For one room that is a careful half hour. For forty identical bathrooms it is days of repetitive work, and the sheets rarely end up laid out the same way twice.

The native way, and its limits

• +Interior elevations: place an elevation marker inside the room, tick all four directions, then adjust each elevation’s crop region to the room’s walls, floor and ceiling. Repeat for every room.
• +Plan and ceiling plan: duplicate the level’s plan and ceiling plan, crop each one to the room, apply a view template and set the scale.
• +3D: duplicate a 3D view and set a section box around the room by hand, then hide whatever blocks the view into it.
• +Sheet: drag every view onto a sheet and line the elevations up by eye. Schedules of finishes or contents are set up separately.
• +Dynamo scripts can automate parts of this, but they have to be built and kept working, and rooms with irregular shapes or walls in linked models are where they tend to break.

With Room Manager: the whole set per room, on its own sheet

Room Manager handles irregular room geometry, walls in linked models and a rotated true north. Its Re-centre Tags companion moves every room tag back onto the centre of its room.

1. 01Open Room Manager from the Bim3Lab tab, search the rooms by any parameter, built-in or shared, and pick the ones to document.
2. 02Views: choose interior elevations, floor plan, ceiling plan and a 3D view, each with its own view template, margin and scale. The 3D view opens into the room: the two near walls and the ceiling are left out so you can see the fittings.
3. 03Schedule: pick the room finishes columns in your own order, and add a count of how many rooms of each type the model holds, by any parameter, not just Name.
4. 04Contents: schedule what is inside each room (mirror, basin, WC, the parts of a super family), found from Revit’s own room association or from a parameter you fill in yourself.
5. 05Sheets: one sheet per room, fitted to the content. If the views do not fit, a bigger title block is used; extra sheets only if even the largest is too small. The elevations sit on one floor line.
6. 06Run. The whole run happens in one transaction, so a single Ctrl+Z reverts it.

Tips for room documentation

• +Set up view templates for room elevations, plans and ceiling plans first. Every room then comes out with the same graphics.
• +Run one room as a test, check the sheet, then run the rest with the same settings.
• +The finishes schedule covers the whole model on its own. Rooms only need selecting for the views and sheets.

Room Manager, on video

Press play to load the video from YouTube. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you do.

Questions