Here’s a good one for you – we have a client who asked if we could get volume calculations out of Revit, and after our initial answer of “sure”, they followed it up with, “OK, how about giving us the volme of water it will take to fill up this pool.”
Ummm…
My first reaction is that to get volume from an irregular shape like that we’d need to generate a mass that had the overall shape of the water area of the pool – taking lots of voids out of a basic mass to get the volume information. The short answer for that solution is that it would be no fun at all! Not to mention it’s not flexible as the pool design changes. Chuck Jolin from our Denver office looked at it a little and said, “Why don’t you just use a room object?”
Duh
It’s just one of those things that becomes completely obvious once someone else makes the statement. Here are a couple of items that make it work a little better:
Make sure that all of the items that form the 3D perimeter of the Room are all set to be Room Bounding in their properties. Should be obvious, but it needs to be stated.
Create a unique level for the water line (usually a little below the top of the pool, right?) and place your room on that level. In this situation Revit does better projecting down than projecting up, so we don’t want the room to be placed at the bottom of the pool – and by creating a unique level for the water line we’re able to better control how the volume is calculated.
Another one that should be obvious, but be sure that room volume calculations are turned on in your room settings
To make the room volumes easier to see, in Visibility / Graphic Overrides, turn on the visibility of the room’s “Interior Fill” and potentially “Reference” sub-components.
When you’ve taken care of all of the above tasks, place a room on the appropriate level and check out its properties. Set the room’s upper limit to 0’-0” and lower limit to something below the bottom of the pool. In this case I set it to -20’.
If you create a section and look at the before and after shots of the Room within the pool’s boundary, you can see how it fills in the available volume of space. It even looks a little like water.
Now, for the question about rendering the water in Revit since Rooms don’t show in 3D views and there really isn’t any physical geometry associated with Rooms. Make a solid with a water material – it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match the pool outline since you won’t see the stuff that is outside the pool boundary.
And use 3DS MAX Design. Just sayin’.
Have fun!
joe
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