LEGEND OR NOT

This one dates back 2 years to a discussion on the Volterra WhatsApp group.  I had met Mark Dietrick for the first time a couple of months earlier, in Tuscany at the Reality Capture workshop he was instrumental in organizing.  I don’t remember just what input he was asking for and what my contribution was, but I did a small exercise to illustrate a method which I will attribute to both of us.

This is also in response to a video that Paul Aubin posted with a cute little method for “faking” a legend for colour-coded furniture plans (or any other category)

There are two parts to the method.  The second part involves sorting room types into rows so their areas can be totaled.  I think that was Mark’s concept, but my memory is a bit hazy.  Anyway, I will come back to that.  The first part is a way of doing a “legend” for a coloured room plan that incorporates a column for areas.

The “legend” is actually a schedule.  Column 1 is the built-in Image parameter that was added to Revit some years ago.  Normally we might use that for something like washroom fittings to display a thumbnail image of the specified item.  In this case I loaded small coloured squares from a folder.  I created these squares using Photoshop, just 150x150 jpegs with specified RGB values. 

You need to match these RGB values to the ones used in the colour scheme for the plans.  Once you have assigned them to a room, they will show up in “Manage Images” and you can easily assign them to as many rooms as you need, via the popup dialogue.

 

In case you need to reserve the built-in Image parameter for some other purpose, it’s easy enough to create a new Project Parameter of the Image category.  In this case, I called it Colour Code 01 and put it in the Identity Data group along with the original Image parameter.  Don’t know of any way to move this up in the order.  If it was Furniture you could open a family up in Family Editor to do that, but being a system family, Rooms don’t open in Family Editor.

Not a big deal. This time I have used the original four images that I created, which match the first 4 colours that Revit automatically assigns to a Colour Scheme.

Let’s move on to the second part.  We want to have a separate area column for each category of room.  This is done by creating new, custom Area parameters for the Room Category.  I called these “Area-a”, “Area-b” etc.  We can use an “IF” formula to populate these columns.  If the condition is true, copy the automatic room area to the custom field.  If it is false set the custom field to zero.

I used an Integer parameter called “Dept Index” to achieve this.  So the formula takes the form: IF(Dept Index = 1, Area, 0)  For each value of Dept Index the formula is adjusted to match.

 

To coordinate “Dept Index” with “Department” I created a Key Schedule for the Room Category.  Believe it or not, I had never really used Key Schedules before, certainly not on a regular basis.  First of all you choose a family category (Rooms) then you choose to “Schedule Keys”. This will generate a “Room Style” field which you can use to control other fields, in this case “Department” and “Dept Index”.

If you decide to create another Key Schedule for Rooms, those two parameters will no longer be available.  You can’t have a parameter being controlled by two different fields.  That would lead to conflicts. 

In the Properties dialogue box, any parameters that are controlled by a Key Schedule are greyed out. I guess you might have a situation where you want to have two keys for Rooms, let’s say “Dept Style” and “Finishes Style”.

 

A schedule with multiple columns where most of the boxes contain a “zero” can be very confusing to read.  Too much irrelevant information.  To counter this, I came up with the idea of using “Conditional Formatting” to grey out all the zero cells. 

 

Paul used the example of a furniture plan, so I decided to test that example.  But first of all I wanted to generate a basic reservoir of colours that could be used “for ever more”.  These are all basically “Pastel Shades” … because you don’t want the colours of rooms or furniture to dominate over the walls that contain them.  I guess I might want to create another, darker set at some point that can be used for solid objects, maybe for walls of different fire ratings, acoustic or thermal insulation values. 

But step one is a set of 57 pastels starting with “lilac” and finishing with “pink”, plus five shades of Grey.

The naming convention uses a number to keep them in order, plus a RGB value to aid with setting the colours in a “Colour Scheme” or a set of “View Filters”

To colour the furniture I set up three view filters, simply named “style 1”, “style 2” & “style 3”.  These are based on the “Comments” field which sits next to the “Image” field.  At the moment these are coordinated manually, which is easy to do via a schedule.  I guess you could automate that with Dynamo if you really want.

In my current iteration the schedule is formatted as a simple legend, but it would be easy enough to add a quantities column.  You could also create separate columns for the different types of furniture perhaps so that you could see the distribution of styles for Sofas, then Tables, and so on.

Hope you found this helpful.  You can download my pastel images from the link below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zNofFKBnOp9PuzZjQais-CXHGp6Xclf1/view?usp=sharing