Conquering the Dilemma of Rooms and Spaces in Revit

CRAIG HOWIE: Good day, everyone. Really good to be with you today for this session, Conquering the Dilemma of Rooms and Spaces in Revit. So about the speakers for today. This is the virtual recording. You've only got me for the session, but the live recording at Autodesk University will be both myself and Sergio.

A little bit about myself. My name is Craig Howie. I'm the digital director at AECOM. I'm based in Durban, South Africa. And Sergio Castanheira is the BIM and Information Management lead at AECOM, also based in South Africa. And he's managing a BIM team down that side of the world.

So the learning objectives for this session-- you're going to learn about the differences between rooms and spaces. We're going to learn about how engineers use rooms and room bounding elements, and some of the challenges that specifically the MEP engineers face with spaces today. We're going to learn about and see some techniques for both rooms and spaces QAQC. And then, I'm going to demonstrate a simple room and space change management tracking process.

All right, so to start with some fundamentals, just to highlight some differences between rooms and spaces. Because the tools within Revit itself are actually quite similar in how they function, but the actual room and space component within Revit themselves are actually quite different. So I mentioned that rooms are components, and they are architectural components mainly used for maintaining information about occupied areas. Rooms are extensively used by architects and interior designers. And as a general takeout, their importance is generally well known, and they're relatively well used across the industry.

Spaces, on the other hand, are MEP components and they are used for different purposes. So they're used to analyze volumes. And they're used by MEP engineers, but I'd say that they're most probably not as widely used by MEP engineers as what rooms are by architects in the industry. And I'd say that's because their importance is a little bit less known, or at least appreciated or realized, because there are some challenges with how spaces work today in Revit.

So to talk briefly a little bit more about rooms and spaces, and specifically about the fundamental differences between the two different components. So you have rooms. Just out of interest, rooms have 24 different parameters. And they are all the sorts of things that you would expect a room component for an architect to have.

Generally, in the industry, we see architects add a lot of custom, shared parameters to rooms because architects deal with the rooms slightly differently in different locations. So there's 24 different parameters in a room. Within a space, there's a lot more parameters-- almost three times the amount of parameters. So there's actually close to 72 different parameter inputs that you can put into a space component. So you can see that it's a lot more data rich than what a room is.

All right, so there are some similarities between rooms and spaces, specifically when it comes to parameters. So you'll see on the left that constraints, dimensions, identity data, phasing, and IFC parameters are all very similar, if not exactly the same between a room component and a space component.

There is some form of-- let's call it a relationship between a room and a space. So you can see, in this particular highlighted example, that the room number and the room name, because the room is placed, or the space is placed, on top of the room in the model, it understands that room and that space are in the same location. And it actually automatically pulls that information across. You'll see that it's grayed out, so it's hard coded. You can't edit that information.

But the space does understand that that space is connected to that room. And you can see, it's sitting in the identity data. You're then able to use the space naming tool, where that basically maps the information from a room automatically into a space object.

All right, then with rooms, there are some unique parameters. There's only a few-- things like occupancy, department, and then different finish parameters. In general, these parameters are filled out, can be helpful to the MEP engineer downstream. Generally, as long as the architect is filling out room information that's consistent, the MEP engineer can decide whether or not they need that information or not. So more is better, as long as it's consistently filled in. Then, the MEP engineer can decide whether or not they want to use that information.

As you can see with spaces, there are a lot more spaces available and there's a lot more parameters available, and there's a lot of parameters related to electrical, mechanical, and energy analysis parameters, which aren't present in a room because the architect doesn't necessarily need that information. But the MEP engineer needs all that information to do design planning for MEP systems.

All right, so to talk to the topic of the dilemma or challenges of MEP spaces today, so just to look at the process and the workflow that's involved. So when you do model setup, the MEP team will generally set up a separate model. They will then link in architecture, structures, interiors, models into that model. They will then set all the links to room bounding. They will copy/monitor levels and grids. They will check room bounding elements. They will then place spaces, automatically. They'll then run the space naming tool, to match the room numbers and names to the space numbers and names. And then they want to-- then the MEP engineer will want to check if spaces are usable. That's where the problem comes in, all right?

So essentially, what happens is, you get all the way to that point and then the MEP engineer has problems with using the spaces. So the result is that they then don't use spaces within Revit, a lot of the time, and they revert back to-- either back to previous workflows or methods, or alternatively to much more manual methods that they've used in the past. And the result of this is that Revit then pretty much gets dumbed down, and it's essentially working as a drafting tool. Because the MEP engineer doesn't have those data-rich spaces, they can't necessarily do some of the downstream things that you can do with spaces in Revit, like the various design that you can actually do within Revit, and planning for MEP, or for spaces.

All right, so this is an example of a layout which, which is a fairly typical thing that happens with spaces. So this is an MEP model. There's an architecture link, possibly a structures link, within this plan or within this model. And we've gone ahead and we've used the space placement tool. And you can see that the spaces are in a bit of a mess. And that's quite common, and the reason why a lot of people move away from trying to use spaces, in general, within Revit.

So there's a couple of different things happening in this layout. So the first one is, you can see, by the yellow star there, there's a space that is saying that it's unoccupied. So that space has been placed, but the room bounding is incorrect, and so it can't fully work out the volume of the area that we're looking to work out.

The next issue, if you look at that red star, you can see that spaces are being placed in an area outside of the building, which in all reality, most probably doesn't need a space, doesn't need to have MEP calculations done on it. So what often happens is, you'll place spaces and then it'll place a whole lot of spaces in areas, sometimes that you don't necessarily need them in. And you have to spend quite a lot of time going in and maintaining that.

The next one is, you can see that there's some ducts at the bottom of the layout. And the spaces just haven't, for whatever reason, placed into those ducts. But depending on what type of MEP engineer you are, most probably you do want spaces in those ducts because that's part of your planning, and your calculations, and analysis.

And in the last one is another space that you can see that's unoccupied, even though there clearly should be a room or space there. And sometimes, it gives you faults like that.

So a lot of this is an issue for the MEP engineer. Because for all of these-- if not necessarily all, but most of these examples-- they have to go back to the architect, to ask them to update and change things in their model, and make them more suitable, so that the spaces work. So it's not the fastest process when things are not correct, and there's a lot of control that sits with the architect because they're generally the ones modeling the room bounding elements or space bounding elements. And the MEP engineers process gets slowed down.

Next, we're going to talk about setting up project requirements for spaces. So it's really important, at the beginning of a project, to make sure that you understand what you want to do. So you need to ask the question, at the beginning, is the MEP engineer going to use MEP spaces? If the answer is no, then really the architect can produce and issue models as per normal. If the answer is yes, then there needs to be a bit more care taken with how the different consultants are working with either rooms or specific, room bounding elements.

So what we recommend is that you set up a BIM execution plan, and within that BIM execution plan, you actually cover some information around rooms and spaces and what's expected. So there would be generally three things in a BIM execution plan that you should cover related to rooms and spaces.

The first one is just listing spaces as a BIM use, and that spaces will be used, and those spaces will be used for different design and volume planning. The next thing is making sure that it's very clear on element ownership who has responsibilities for what, who's going to set certain elements to room bounding, who's not, who's going to also set certain elements to certain functions that spaces rely on. And then the last one is just general QAQC.

Rooms and spaces QAQC is often overlooked. And it's really critical, if you're looking to use an integrated workflow where rooms are being used by the architect, and MEP spaces are being used extensively by the MEP engineer. So having some sort of checks and balances is really important.

So for the architect, as you move to the right-hand side of the diagram, or the process diagram, the architect needs to follow some sort of QAQC process related to rooms. For the MEP engineer, very similar. They also need to follow some sort of QAQC process. But it would also help, generally, if the engineer has some sort of change management process with regards to rooms and spaces, so that they can target-- when there's updates to particular spaces, they can go in and target those spaces, and don't have to look through all the spaces of the project.

All right, so before we speak just about rooms, in general there's four different methods for QAQC both rooms and spaces in Revit. There is visual checking-- just looking at plans or views, and seeing if the rooms or the spaces look correct. Not super high tech, but that is one of the ways that you can check rooms and spaces in Revit. Doing that a little bit smarter, you're able to still do visual checks, but using View Templates, which can help you clearly identify certain things in models. And I'll show you an example of a view template idea for checking just now.

Then, you've got Revit schedules. They're really good mechanism to do quick checks and see information. And you can make those Revit schedules a little bit smarter than just out of the box. And you can very effectively use those schedules to highlight where there's potential issues in your quality, so that you can very quickly fix those issues before you issue models.

And then the last one is more around QAQC and validation. So you do have tools like Autodesk Interoperability Tools, or Autodesk Validation Tool. And you have stuff like model checker check sets that you can use, which do check certain QAQC type things within Revit models. So the challenge with QAQC at the moment, with rooms and spaces, is that there isn't one method to do all the different checks that you need to do.

So sometimes you have to do visual checks. Sometimes you can do visual checks with View Templates. Sometimes you can use Revit schedules. And then the model checker check sets only check certain things. They don't check everything that you would want to be checking. So it is still quite disjointed, but there are different mechanisms to do QAQC.

So if we are to look at a typical workflow for what an architect should be doing with regards to rooms QAQC, before they issue a model out to other disciplines-- so the first thing, and one of the most important things, is to check that room binding elements are set correctly. This is most probably the biggest issue when it comes to rooms and spaces, or at least space creation, that room binding elements are not set correctly for the engineer to work effectively with those elements. So that's pretty important.

The second thing is, if the engineer is going to use the spaces for design, you need to make sure that, as the architect, you're setting the walls, doors, and windows functions correctly, so that when the engineer extracts that information-- potentially the space information out of Revit as a GBXML file-- that the accurate space data gets pulled out of Revit. And if you don't have the wall functions correctly done, it pulls inaccurate information.

Then, there is some sort of completion of QAQC that you need to do. If you pick up that there are issues, then you need to perform updates. If you don't pick up any issues, then you can run the model checksets for validation. And at that point, you're then ready to publish and share your models.

So here's an example of a visual check, but a slightly smarter visual check, where we are using View Templates to check that elements are either set to exterior function or to interior function. So it's a simple view template. It's looking at the function of walls, and windows, and doors.

And you can see that certain elements are colored purple, and then certain elements are colored green. If you look at the bottom right of the plan view, you can see a purple wall, quite clearly in the middle of all the green walls, which means that that wall function is set incorrectly, and that will have an effect on the spaces model. So this is a quick way to visually check your quality, and then to make the updates that are needed.

All right, then for the architecture teams, we generally have three different schedules for doing validation and management of rooms. We specifically put them and create them as three separate schedules, so that you're using the schedule for a particular task. Once you're finished with that task, you move to the next schedule and the next one.

Instead of making it part of all one schedule-- it can get very busy and complicated-- we want our teams to work through their QA/QC in some sort of order. So the first one is a schedule that looks at not placed, not enclosed, and redundant views. So you can quickly go in action that. The next one is something that looks at unnamed rooms. And then the last one is looking at some room best practices.

So I'm going to talk a little bit later in the presentation about spaces. We are going into a bit more detail about these three schedule types and how they work. All right, and then I mentioned a little bit earlier that you are able to do validation. And Autodesk does have a tool for doing checks on rooms and spaces. And that's the Autodesk Model Checker for Revit tool.

Using that tool, you're able to check against and report against unplaced, redundant, and unenclosed rooms and spaces. You're also able to verify that all rooms and spaces have unique names and numbers. So you can see that this particular model only scored 50% because there were some redundant and enclosed rooms. And then there were also some unnamed rooms.

So this is a really good way to validate models, so that you know that you're sharing models with other consultants that are the right quality. All right, so how do we improve working with spaces? So I walk through the space's workflow earlier, where we get to a point and we want to check the spaces and then the spaces are unusable.

All right, even getting to that point, there's definitely some enhancements that we believe could happen with the actual tools themselves. And I've highlighted these on this slide with the yellow stars. So I'm going to talk briefly just now about how we think the Set all Links to Room Bounding tool could be improved.

I'm also going to talk about how the Check Room Bounding elements tool could be improved. And then, also how we can look to improve the Run the Space naming tool. So there's definitely some tool enhancements that can happen.

And then we're also looking at certain interventions from our side, where we're trying to put in more robust QA/QC processes to make sure that the spaces are the correct quality for us to use them. So if we continue along the process-- and I'm not going to run through it again-- but we get-- we check if the spaces are usable. We complete our QA/QC process with Revit schedules.

We then check, are there any issues? In an ideal world, there's no issues. We can then move swiftly on to space planning and then design and modeling processes. So the next step would be, in our space planning, would be to assign space properties in Revit as required, create zoning color plans. And then we can start our design process.

So what we're really trying to do is minimize the need to loop back on ourselves, back to the architect, over and over again. So if there are issues, yes, then you need to request updates. The architect needs to make the updates in their model. They need to reshare their models. And then the MEP engineer needs to consume. And that really adds a lot of time to the process. So you want to try and avoid that.

So talking about some of these tool enhancements that we're referring to. So a big theme with space is, at the moment, is how it deals with links. So if you look at this Manage Links dialog box, you'll see that there's a couple of different links loaded in. And you have controls over certain things in that Manage Links dialog box.

One of the pain points with this dialog box and how it works is for every link, you need to select the link. Go into the Type Properties for the link. Turn on Room Bounding. You need to close that link. You need to then go into the next link. Select it. Go into room bounding, which is very time consuming and not really efficient.

So we'd really like to see that made a lot smarter. What we think that would look like is adding, potentially, a room bounding toggle in the Manage Links dialog box. So you can very quickly, without having to drop and edit the type properties for each link, you could just select that at the Manage Links level.

And you can very quickly toggle on and off the models you want to have as room bounding. Continuing on the theme of managing links and being able to do more with links, because I do think that is quite critical, we'd also like to give the MEP engineer a little bit more control.

So like I said earlier, one of the challenges with how room bounding elements work, and the fact that the MEP engineer is completely reliant on room bounding elements, room bounding elements that are only found in other teams models-- the walls, the windows, the doors, those sorts of things-- the MEP engineer today doesn't have much control.

So when things go wrong, it's time consuming to get those things fixed. So an enhancement for managed links would be to give the MEP engineer the ability to override certain things within links.

So the MEP engineer should be able to go and override certain elements and say that they are room bounding or they're not room bounding, potentially even going in and overriding the functions, where they're not set correctly. That would really help. And then the MEP engineer would be a lot less reliant on the architect for quality.

The next thing that really needs an overhaul is the highlight boundaries tool. There are major issues with this tool when you're working with links. It really just doesn't work very well. You can see the image on the right. So this is an MEP model. We've linked in the architecture model. We run the highlight boundaries tool. And it just highlights the whole thing in blue. And then there's random elements that are orange.

It doesn't really give you good visual feedback on which elements are room bounding. So we found this tool to be completely inappropriate or unsuitable right now when it comes to links. And generally, our room bounding elements are always, at least for MEP engineers, always in a link itself.

So the suggestion here would either be to improve how the highlight boundaries tool works today or alternatively, if Autodesk allowed for room bounding parameters to be more accessible in schedules and in filters. So today, unfortunately, you can't go and create a view filter that says highlight all the room bounding elements a certain color. And highlight all non-room bounding elements another color.

You're unable to get at the room bounding parameter. So making that available would really open up various workflows for us to be able to use, instead of actually having the highlight boundaries tool needing to be fixed. All right, then there's also some need for some improvements around how space bounding works, and specifically, potentially, having space bounding functioning off of the actual element function.

So if you look at the image on the left, an architect typically calculates room areas at the wall finish. And that's the setting. If you look at the image in the middle, you've got an MEP engineer that typically needs to calculate space areas, either to the center or to the exterior finish of walls. But generically, you would have to choose one. So they would most probably typically just choose to calculate areas at the center of the wall.

What we need with this is to have more flexibility. So we need, potentially, rather that, instead of just having one setting for the room comparison tool, or the room computational, or area computational tool to be able to have flexibility potentially around what wall type or element type it is. So if it's an exterior wall, it should do one thing. If it's an interior wall, it should do another thing.

So what would that look like in the actual dialog box? So the image on the left is what you get today. Within each Revit model, you get one option for room area computation. And you have to choose that option. And it applies across the board. What we would like to have is probably some more flexibility and granularity, as to how this works.

So what we've mocked up here is a concept around-- well, potentially, we would want to have settings for interior walls and then separate settings for exterior walls, just as an idea. And that would then function more appropriately for what the industry potentially needs. This was probably a lot more combinations of what would be needed. But at least this is the concept.

So there's lots of issues with room bounding elements. And there are definitely workarounds to avoid this. And one of those is just to not use room bounding elements. So what we see some of our internal teams do is, instead of linking in the architects model and then making that link room bounding, and then fighting with having challenges with room bounding elements, what the team does is they link the architects model in.

And then they just trace over the top of that plan with room separation lines. Then they have a lot of control of where they can place those room separation lines. And they can define the spaces in the way that they want to define them. So this is a workaround. I wouldn't say, necessarily, this is the approach that we want to apply across all our projects.

But I have seen it as a workflow. It seems quite a robust approach, especially maybe on small to medium sized projects, where you have maybe the time to do this. But it doesn't seem that feasible on very big projects. The shortfalls of it is, obviously, that it's very labor intensive. You're having to draft all of these room separation lines or space separation lines.

They don't auto update when there's changes. You're having to go in and do a lot of checking to confirm that all the spaces are matching the rooms. And it's really not a connected sort of model first workflow. But it is a workaround, nonetheless. All right, then the next tool that most probably needs some improvements or enhancements would be the space naming tool.

Really great tool that can go and update your space names to match room names. But one of the challenges with it today is that, if you look at the dialog box on the left, you aren't really getting any feedback or prompts from the tool. So it's just, do you want to run this space naming tool. You click OK. And it updates everything. It doesn't really tell you what it's going to update or necessarily what it has updated.

So there definitely could be some enhancements to this tool. And the thing we would want it to do is-- and we've sort of mocked it up in the bottom left there-- before we accept all the changes, we would like it to show us what are the changes. And we've said, OK, the changes for this particular run would be current space name is cafeteria. The new space name is dining room.

And then it would list out what the changes are going to be, so then you can choose to run the update, potentially not run the update. You could also then, potentially, extract that information or changes and use that downstream. So we really need something that prompts us on what the changes are going to be and maybe also what the changes have been-- would be really helpful.

OK, then I showed briefly some of the Revit schedules that we use for room checking and validation earlier. The schedules that we use for spaces, the MEP engineers use for spaces are very similar. There were three or four rooms. In the case of spaces, there's four. So let's go into a little bit more detail about these.

So the first one is not placed, not enclosed, or redundant. So on the right, we've got a Revit schedule. Very clearly is set to filter by room, space area, and space volume. That is not placed, or redundant, or not enclosed. So we're only seeing the spaces in this schedule that are problems. We can very quickly work our way down this list, remove the spaces that are not needed, or fix the spaces that are not working correctly.

So the schedule itself is very focused on that as a task. The next one is unnamed spaces. So when you place a space for the first time, it defaults to the space name "space." So you can see on the left hand side here, the schedule is giving us very good feedback. Sorry, in the left hand column of the schedule.

In column A, you can see, it's giving us very quick feedback on the spaces. And it's telling us exactly all of these items in red have not been named, or unnamed, because they've still got the default space name. So again, we can very quickly work our way down this list and understand where we maybe still need to name spaces, or potentially, those are spaces that we don't actually need.

The next schedule is unique to spaces. We don't necessarily use this for rooms. And there is a little bit of a workaround to get this to work. But the schedule is essentially, it does a comparison against the room number and names and checks those against the space numbers and names. It checks if they match or not.

So you'll see that in the schedule, we've got different items highlighted, where the space name and the room name do not match. Unfortunately, within a Revit schedule, you're unable to compare text fields with text fields.

So we've had to use a bit of a workaround, where we use a Dynamo script to run the check for us. And then it populates a yes/no custom parameter that we've put into the schedule. And then we use that yes/no to highlight items. But I guess a feature there from Autodesk would be really great if we could compare text parameters within a schedule.

But again, it gives us very quick feedback as to where the problems are. All the yellow-- sorry-- all the orange items are items that we should go and confirm that we are happy with them being different. And it's really quickly giving us insights as to where there is potential quality issues.

OK, then the last one is the spaces best practice. This one is really focused on making sure that our base offsets and our limit offsets are right for spaces because sometimes, this can cause a little bit of havoc. And you can see that in column F, it's highlighting where the base offsets are not zero.

So as a general rule, we're wanting to have our base offsets zero. So it's just flagging, OK, we see this as -300 or -200. Is this correct? We've also got some columns at the end, where we've done some customization of those columns, where it can tell us whether or not a height is bound or not bound. So you can do a bit of stuff, just with schedules with a bit of smart filtering and that sort of thing.

All right, then I mentioned earlier that a big thing with spaces is understanding what's changed. So at the moment within Revit itself, there isn't really a robust way of telling between one version of the model and the next, what either rooms or what spaces changed. So that's a bit of a problem.

With other tools that Autodesk has, if you look at Autodesk Construction Cloud, if you look at their compare feature, I would say that today it's not sufficient for the needs of really robustly understanding what's changed with rooms and what's changed with spaces.

And so just out of interest with ACC, you would think that the compare tool within design collaboration would be able to compare rooms and spaces. It can't because that really should be the workflow before you consume a model. You're comparing the versions from the previous one to the one that's just been shared with you.

You look. You compare the rooms and spaces . And you decide, yes, I want to consume this model because we had agreed to these spaces or rooms changing size or whatever the case may be. So the compare feature within design collaboration actually doesn't do the comparison of rooms and spaces.

Within ACC Docs, it does do comparison of rooms, not of spaces. And that's only in 2D. And there's a couple of limitations with that. So it's not really a feature that we're actively using for change management when it comes to rooms and spaces. OK, so leading off of that, we've come up with our own workaround method of doing the space change management.

All right, so if we look at the overall workflow for change management, now overlaid over our previous spaces workflow-- and I won't go through the whole thing in detail. But you have a design change at the start. The architect, structural engineer, and interior designer makes updates and shares their models.

And then at this point, you must probably want to capture some information related to the room and spaces data in Revit. Then you run through your whole process of review and updating the spaces. And then at some point before you start your design again, if you look at the space planning swimlane, you want to be able to compare all old spaces versus new space data.

Is there a tool that does that today? No, there isn't. So we've come up with a bit of a workaround process to do this. OK, so this is a model a Revit model. And let me just get that started. All right, so we have a Revit schedule. The Revit schedule has different information. Columns B through to E is all the current space information. And then columns F through to I is all the previous information.

We've got stuff highlighted, columns J through to the right of where there were changes in the previous round of receiving a model. So what we would do is we would go in. We've got a Dynamo script that will run a comparison. And essentially, it takes the current information and moves it into the previous. It also scrubs the old parameters in column J onwards.

We then reload the model back in that we've just received. And then it updates the changes of the spaces. So if you look at columns J onwards, it's now highlighting where areas have changed. You can see that one of the models has changed by quite a lot, 99%. We would then go in and review those models to see what those changes were. And then potentially, the MEP engineer has to update their calculations.

So that is a very simple way of doing space comparison, through using just the Revit schedule, a simple Dynamo script, taking your previous space data, moving it into some placeholder columns, bringing in a new model, getting that information to update, and then it comparing against the previous and new information, and highlighting it in different cells.

We can very quickly now move to the area differences and the volume differences on the far right, and see what items have changed, and go and action those items. All right then, also on the topic of change management with spaces, so I mentioned that spaces and rooms are all components in Revit. So they are not actually families.

But we do believe that probably Revit needs to change the way it deals with spaces. And maybe spaces and rooms actually need to be system families. With them being 3D objects, we could then potentially, maybe do slightly better change management with those objects.

That would open up a lot of new processes and options to do better change management and then also other downstream benefits of having those as 3D objects. I'm going to quickly talk through some of those.

So if you've got other tools on the market that work with rooms quite intuitively, so you're able to export rooms out of Revit to the design coordination software. Yes, you can export rooms out to a tool like Navisworks. It's not very intuitive in Navisworks.

Doesn't really work with rooms very well, whereas other products on the market, if you export those rooms out, they come through into the design coordination software as 3D objects. And then you're able to work with those rooms more intuitively.

Once those 3D objects are in the design coordination software-- because they're objects, you can select them, and you can see the properties related to those rooms. That's really helpful when you're doing coordination and being able to see that data when you're working in the model.

What it also does is it allows you to have a different experience when you're using those rooms or spaces to navigate. So in the image on the left, in this particular tool, you're actually able, because you've got rooms and spaces in the design coordination tool now, you can go and search for that tool. And you can very quickly navigate and teleport to a particular room or space.

This is really helpful when models are very big and you want to navigate to a particular area very quickly. Having that family or that object to use as part of your navigation is really helpful. Another really nice feature is while you're navigating the design collaboration tool, it can actually prompt you where there are different rooms and spaces.

So I'm standing in this area at the moment in the image on the right. I can see what's ahead of me. I can see what's to the side. And as I navigate through the model, I'm able to see and get better spatial awareness. So there's definite benefits of having that feature.

All right, so in summary, how a project uses rooms and spaces today in Revit needs to be well planned and managed. If you don't plan, you will find yourself spending a lot of time trying to manage spaces, which will become unproductive. Don't just assume that people know all about how rooms and spaces work.

I must say that I thought I knew most things about rooms and spaces before preparing for this presentation. I thought my teams knew a lot about rooms and spaces. And we learned a lot in putting this together. They're very simple tools. But I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about how they work, how they relate to one another, how to get around issues that occur, and that sort of thing.

So I think it's well worth doing training on rooms and spaces in each company if you're really wanting to be serious about them. We've shown some ideas around planning and managing rooms and spaces more effectively. In all honesty, if you look at the process diagrams we've shown, they're a little bit complicated and convoluted.

I think the whole process still remains more complicated than what we would like and what the industry would like. So it would be really great if there were some enhancements to the tools that made it less complicated. And then yes, we illustrated a couple of ideas around tool changes.

I think there definitely is quite a lot that could be done to improve things. It could really help the industry with adoption of these tools more widely. So great, thanks a lot for your time today. And it was a pleasure talking with you.