We have all been there before. We spend a considerable amount of time working with our clients on a programming exercise, determining the appropriate square footages of each room, which department these rooms belong to and even some of the special requirements for each and every one of these spaces. At the end of the day we may have a beautiful color coded Excel file that we present to our client for comments and sign-off. Now that we have completed this exercise, we are ready for form and fit.
Now comes the tricky part. How do we take all of this room data that we spent so much time working on in Excel and place it into our Revit model efficiently and with accuracy? You can certainly place each room in the model, one by one, and fill out all of the appropriate data from the programming document. This method is still the typical workflow for a lot of offices, but if you have several hundred rooms, you could be spending days placing rooms and filling in data. Then comes the part with checking the square footage. What if your newly placed rooms are over or under the programming requirements? How are you going to know? What kinds of checks and balances will you have in place? You will more than likely have to compare each room, line by line, with your programming document and make adjustments from there.
With Ideate BIMLink, you can easily take your Excel based programming data, such as the room number, room name, department, target square footage, and any additional requirements to create unplaced rooms in your Revit model. In addition, you can create a Programming Room Schedule in your Revit model that can calculate the percentage difference between your programming areas and actual areas and have it flag the major deviations with a color code, allowing you to quickly identify the rooms that will need adjustments.
Use Ideate BIMLink to quickly create unplaced rooms based on your owners programming requirements.
For a complete how-to video on this process, view it on our YouTube channel.
About the Author
Sash Kazeminejad - ACI, LEED AP AEC Senior Application Specialist
Sash brings proficiency in Autodesk solutions including AutoCAD and Revit Architecture to Ideate customers. His industry experience includes project management, BIM Management, and design for Architectural firms in California, Montana and Oregon. He is LEED accredited professional and is on track to achieve California licensure with Oregon to follow. In his academic life, Sash was awarded a variety of college scholarships, earned a BA in Environmental Design, a MA in Architecture from Montana State University (MSU) and taught Building Information Modeling courses at MSU Gallatin College. As a Revit Architecture Autodesk Certified Instructor, Sash provides Revit Architecture training and support for AEC firms. @sashpdx