Is there a way to automatically create ceiling plenums for rooms? or do we need to create them in our modelling software. I work with IESVE mostly,
We currently donāt have this feature but we have all the infrastructure to add it to the Model Editor. It has been requested a few times but we werenāt fully ready to implement it.
Let me discuss this with @chriswmackey and get back to you.
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Hey @franciscocontreras ,
As Mostapha says, auto-generating ceiling plenums for each room in a story is very do-able if the model is set up correctly. Am I right that you currently have a model where there is a gap in between the two stories that you would like to have filled with the ceiling plenum?
If so, would you be able to share this model with us via PM so that we can use it for testing? This way, we could make sure that the current auto-generation of plenums that we have implemented is actually what you want before we invest all the time that is needed to expose it on the model editor.
I actually just exported the spaces floor-to-floor (using extruded height) and used IESVE plenum generation tool to create the voids. That is my current workflow, but it left me thinking it would be great if I can jump that step as well and the geometry be ready.
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Same. This is what i was requesting too. The split spaces tool in the VE is just slow. If we could do it before exporting to GEM, i think it would be faster.
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Hey Chris! I know you had some thoughts/questions about the implementation details. This should be a good time to restart the efforts for this topic.
Thanks, @crduggin .
Implementing this is pretty quick for me, though it may take @antonellodinunzio some time to expose it properly in the model editor given that a new option for āAuto-Generate Plenumsā will have to go next to all of the places where we currently have a āSolve Ceiling Adjacencyā option.
Iāll plan to bump this higher on my priority list but do you have a POMF model that you can share via PM that I can use to test that what I implement gives you what you want? I would essentially need something that has all of the Room floor-to-ceiling-heights set at the ceiling level and then weāll auto-generate plenums in all of the gaps between the ceiling and the floor of the story above.
This way, I can send you a GEM file that has the auto-generated plenums and you can confirm that itās the result you want.
It sounds like you are thinking make the snap shot for floor to ceiling height. Then create plenums above that in Model Editor. I was thinking make a snapshop with it at floor to floor height. Then split those spaces at the ceiling height, so then we get whatever apertures are on the plenum. Iām thinking maintaining the spandrel panels.
Thanks, @crduggin . Iām glad that I asked you before I went off and implemented something that didnāt solve the problem.
It sounds like, instead of something that tries to auto-generate the ceiling plenums for all gaps between the Room ceiling and the floors of the next Story, you actually want a command where you can select a bunch of rooms where the floor-to-ceiling-height is actually set to the floor-to-floor height. Then, the command reduces the floor-to-ceiling height of the selected rooms to what itās actually supposed to be and adds a new ceiling plenum Story to the Model with the plenums modeled as explicit Rooms in the model editor. This command has an input for the height of the new plenum rooms, which is what gets subtracted from the selected rooms and forms the room-floor-to-ceiling height of the newly created plenum rooms (that are complete with spandrel panels and everything else that was trimmed off the original room).
So it all basically does the exact same thing as the IES-VE workflow but probably a little faster and we can handle things like making sure sloped roofs donāt mess the whole thing up (I would infer that the VE tool might not handle those cases gracefully if at all).
Is my understanding correct here about what youāre looking for?
I guess I was just originally thinking that itās easier to look up a Roomās floor-to-ceiling height from the design model and then set up the model based on that rather than looking up both the floor-to-floor height and the plenum heights to be subtracted for each room. But maybe thatās just the architectural background in me. Iām used to thinking in a logic of āLabs have a floor-to-ceiling height of X and that yields this much space for the occupant activitiesā rather than thinking āLabs have a plenum height of X and that yields this much space for mechanical equipment.ā
Sounds right to me.
Early on we only know flr-flr not flr to ceiling. Most of the time in healthcare, I assume 9ft everywhere except ORs.
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Just to chime in with my experience on this. The architectural models are usually not ready with all the ceiling heights by the time we need to start with our calcs. So we would typically have a set of ceiling heights for certain space types and use that. A workflow similar to what IESVE does would work in our case at least.
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Thank you both. This is all very helpful. Itās clear that I will implement the command assuming that the rooms start at the floor-to-floor height and the plenum will be subtracted from it.
I just have one last question: Am I correct that, instead of plugging in the plenum height to this command, you would prefer to input the final room floor-to-ceiling height and the command will do the math for you about what the plenum height should be?
Judging from statements like this:
It sounds like you know intuitively what floor-to-ceiling height you can typically get away with for a given room type and the plenum height is just the remainder of that and the floor-to-floor height that you get from the design model. Or am I wrong and you typically have an established rule about what plenum height you need for a given space so itās the room floor-to-ceiling gets computed as the remainder?
Yes, putting in the flr to ceiling height and the program doing the math would be ideal.
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@crduggin and @franciscocontreras ,
Iām just giving you an update that I finished adding a lot of the core methods that we need to support the plenum generation as we described it above:
@antonellodinunzio and I will be working on exposing it all in the model editor over the next couple of day or so and weāll let you know when we have something ready to test.
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Hi @crduggin and @franciscocontreras, the implementation is done but before we make it publicly available, I have a question for you. I want to know if you need to make changes to the plenum geometries once they are created (e.g. merging them together into a single space) or if is it something that we can generate during the translation. Here is a recording that hopefully clarifies my question.
In case you havenāt seen it, here is the post about comparing and syncing models that Iām referring to in the video.
Hi @mostapha, my gut reaction is that in our workflow we typically would not need to make changes to the plenum elements within the Model Editor environment. Meaning, if the plenum is just a property of the space and no āroomā gets created, that works for us. In particular, if this workflow will make it easier for doing model compares in the future as updates to layout are a big problem when we need to make updates on our end.
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Hey @franciscocontreras and @crduggin ,
I know that we were still waiting for @crduggin 's response on the video that @mostapha made but we decided to be proactive based on your comment, Francisco, and I just finished fully refactoring the plenum workflow.
So we changed things such that you will now assign plenums through the Room table in the model editor. Each room will have attributes for for āceiling plenum depthā and āfloor plenum depth.ā The default value for these properties is zero but you can change them to positive numbers in order to have plenums split off from the room volume during translation of the 2D room polygon into 3D.
By assigning plenums this way, you can keep your model editable and flexible. It will be easy to change the plenum depths if, for example, the design team tells you that the ceiling is in a different location that what you originally assumed. Furthermore, future workflows like the āModel Comparisonā workflow that Mostapha mentioned in the video will work much smoothly given the 1-to-1 relation of the Revit Rooms and the rooms in the model editor.
Still, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to edit plenum geometry (eg. you really need to join a bunch of plenum rooms together and you donāt care about how flexible and editable your model is), we will provide a button that can convert all of the plenum depth properties that you have assigned into explicit rooms so that you can edit them in the model editor. This is similar in principle to the button that is currently in the model editor, which converts the multipliers assigned to Stories into explicit geometry for each repeated Story.
I have finished all of the core development for this whole workflow but @antonellodinunzio and @mingbo will need a few days to expose it all on the model editor. Once we have it in place, I think we should be able to turn it over to you to test.
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After talking to @mostapha, he said yāall already deciding to allow for both workflows, so i figured there was no reason to weigh in. Thanks again for the quick responsive solutions.
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The official release will be in a couple of days, but you can start testing the new plenum feature after updating to Revit 2.238.4. Here is a video that shows how it works:
Let us know if you have any comments. Thank you!
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