Revit and Dynamo for Interior Design

BILL CARNEY: Welcome. I'm Bill Carney. I'm going to do Revit and Dynamo for Interior Design. I hope everybody's well rested after the party last night. So I'm the BIM director at BSA LifeStructures. Structures You can find some more information about me on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect.

A couple of things about me, though. I'm architectural background, I'm not an interior designer. But I have done a lot of interior projects over the course of my career. And a lot of these things are just me trying to share what we're trying to work with at BSA LifeStructures.

I'm also one of the committee members for the St. Louis Revit user group. I'm proud of that. We really meet as a great community to help the St. Louis area using Revit and other design technology. I also, this fall, released my first online training course with lynda.com or LinkedIn Learning, whichever one you want to call it. It's Revit for Visualization. That one's kind of exciting. I'm going to do my next one on this course, actually. So keep an eye out for that in the future.

And then the bigger one in September, I welcome Norman into my house. And I'll tell you, don't submit for a class if you've got a two-month-old. Yeah, I'm not well-rested, but we're going to get through it, and it's going to be a lot of fun.

So I'm fortunate enough to work at a firm that lets me come out here and tell you a bit about what we do. It seems counterproductive to share trade secrets, but it's how we all get better, and I really applaud my firm for doing it. We create inspired solutions that improve lives in the healing, learning, and discovery markets. What that means is mostly health care, higher ed, and lab.

We have seven major offices. Indianapolis is our headquarters. I'm out of the St. Louis office. And we offer professional design services in pretty much everything A&E design, except structures. I didn't name the firm, but I probably wouldn't have put structures in it.

In case you don't know, this is being live streamed. So if I look sweaty and overweight, it's camera tricks, it's fake. What we're going to cover today is Dynamo and Revit. So we're going to cover two programs and one discipline. That's a lot of stuff to cover in 60 minutes. I typically like a very informal presentation. I like to be interrupted. I like to talk with the audience.

Because we're doing the live stream, I'm going to try to keep on pace. I'm going to try to keep within the schedule. I will try to hold that 10 minutes at the end for questions. If you do interject with a question, I probably won't be mad about it.

So what we're going to learn is a lot of stuff about Revit and Dynamo, and how it's going to help us for the interior design discipline. The big thing I put in the bold at the bottom is we're going to learn some workflows that we can use that just help the process of interior design and documentation.

I do want to start with a little bit of back story as far as why and how this developed. I met with our interior design director. We talked about the interior design process that we have within our firm. We went through the entire process, start to finish, just talking about what we collect, how we collect, and how we present it. And we identified a few areas that we thought we could improve upon-- some pain points, things that we really wanted to work at-- and created some goals.

As far as that process goes, initially during preliminary design, what we're doing is storing information in the room parameters and using color fill legends to display that information. Just so I can get a good feel of the crowd, can I get a show of hands. If I say color fill legends, does everybody knows what that is? Awesome.

Cool. All right, so we're using the color fill legends, were showing different categories of room information. And usually we call it room status or a room finish type, and it will be qualities of finishes. And then as we move along, we start to kind of finite tune that design and show what the actual finishes are.

So usually in schematic design, we're still using those color fill legends, but they're applied to actual floor finishes. So CPT1 is showed as green, and that sort of thing. And then design development, we tend to-- older ways, we would export out to Photoshop. We would color it up in Photoshop, show what the actual materials, kind of like the image in the middle. But as a lot of our designers have started using more Revit materials, they're starting to just use a realistic view with that.

And then we move into construction documents, and it's less graphically oriented. And this is the hard part that I struggle with, because I'm sometimes a Revit purist's where I'd just say, tag the floor. But there is a happy medium, and this is a lesson that I like to kind of put out there to anybody that's a BIM director or a BIM manager. Make sure to talk to your designers. They're creating the documents, and the documents aren't just to show what the design is. They're there to show the contractor where something goes. And a lot of the documentation techniques that we've done over the years is based on a paper workflow, which is still there.

I mean, I do want to get to just handing a BIM model to the contractor and let them build it, but we'll put things in just a finished tag instead of a room schedule. I'm used to a finished schedule, but the room tag, as we've worked through it, seems to be more effective for us, as far as less questions on the construction process. So there's things like that. Just evaluate and see what's in there. Don't push what you know, make sure to listen.

And one second notice. There's a warning there. OK. And the real thing that put me in to do this class was accent walls. The way we're showing where highlighted color paint-- and again, us being health care, it's usually a room with one painted color. There's an accent wall in that room and everything else is PT1. That's so many of the offices that we work with. So we'll indicate that during design, development, and SDs as just a color line, which you can kind of see these on this colored graphic plan over here.

That colored line then, during construction documents, we're showing that as an annotation. And it's this that was just kind of driving us nuts. We tried to keep them together, we tried using it as one family, and it was really kind of a hard project. We have a family, and we use that to click points along the wall, and that family has a built an offset on it.

Now, problem with that is that offset, you have to determine whether it's an inside or outside corner, and it makes that line overlap. And this is an area where I wanted to work with what we do, and we tend to just show an angle line at the end where that finish returns. Graphically, it's a pretty simple way to show it. As far as making the family goes, we've looked at using railings, we've looked at generic models. It's kind of a challenge. Does anybody else have a challenge with this before?

Yeah, OK. So we talked about it. It seems simple enough. I was looking at using an adaptive component to read what each angle was going and it's not realistic. So then I came up with the idea of a dynamo. And rather than click and place along the wall and worry about what that offset is, click and place where that line should go.

And Dynamo's fantastic in that it will read that wall, and offset the line from the wall, and be the location. Then all I'm worrying about is whether or not the end of that line has an extension back to the wall, and I have to know how far that extension is. I'm going to show a little bit on that real quick. I'm going to put this down.

All right, so here's a portion of our plan. You can see we have some colored lines, as far as where those accent finishes are going. And here's my script inside of Dynamo. If we change over and go into Construction Documents. I click Run, and you see at places that line right offset from the wall, puts our annotation on there, and builds our note plan as we go along. This is kind of what I knew that we'd be in Dynamo for some of this. A lot of the methods we're able to use are typical Revit tools, but use Dynamo to kind of augment the areas that I know are a challenge.

So knowing that, it let me kind of think of it in a different way in some of the tools I'd have right at my fingertips. The other challenge-- oh, sorry. So that let me kind of think of the overall picture, as far as what we're going to do. And it's store information in the rooms, which I think is a really rock solid way of doing it. It ties into things like dRofus. You can start working in a broader workflow where you're collecting information in room data sheets and actually driving it from the rooms to the model.

So Dynamo being able to read those rooms and place information, that's were it's really powerful to me. So what we kind of thought of is store the information during the schematic design, preliminary design. Use Dynamo to place materials during design development when we're trying to graphically show what's in there. And then in construction document, we have to sync that information back into the schedules and the annotations that we're using to make our construction documents.

So I'm going to skip that for a little bit. We're going to come back to finishes. I wanted to make sure to hit one of the biggest challenges that I know with interior design. I wanted to show this live. My script broke this morning, so I'm just not going to go live. I'm just going to walk through on PowerPoint what's going on.

But synchronizing the rooms from a linked architectural model. Is that a challenge for people? Yeah? So there are a few apps out there that I wanted to mention. I'm going to show Dynamo because this class is on Dynamo. But there's some really good room sync apps. The one that I loved forever was Case's room sync app. You could pick the length model, it'll bring in all of the rooms from that linked model.

But dRofus has a really nice one. So if you talk to the people at dRofus and get on a project with that, it works without being on a project for dRofus. And then BIM One is where Case's app lives now. So if you look up BIM One, you can download and use that. Another thing that I've always considered is using spaces. You can use a space naming utility and not use rooms. Haven't done it, but I wanted to make mention of that.

So copying rooms from the linked model. It's actually not that difficult to do. There's a few custom packages that have nodes in there for getting linked Revit documents. And what you can do from there is pick categories of information from that linked file.

So here, we're just pulling in the linked rooms from our linked model. Then we're finding information about the room. We're finding the location where its at, what its name is. And the key thing for me is the element ID. Then this node over here, the room by location, that's an out of the box Revit node. That'll make a room based on the location you give it.

So you pull the information from the linked model, find the information about it, make your room with that information, and then store a couple of sync parameters in there. And the ones that I store as a status, so I make sure to know that that room was created by Dynamo, and I make sure to store the linked element ID of the room that I copied from.

What that allows me to do is compare that later. This is the script for syncing. It's a lot larger than the script for copying. All the scripts with syncing I've noticed are two to three times larger than what I have for actually placing the object. But what I can do is look at all the items that were created by Dynamo, I can look at the linked element ID, and then it's just an exercise of comparing two lists of lists.

And so what you need to do is figure out what changes. What can happen to that architectural model that changes, and why that element ID or location wouldn't be the same. So the things that I've come up with is a room was moved. And that could be the room was moved on accident. It could be the room was moved because the design changed. Or a new room was added. And that could be a new room to the project, or a new room because the architect deleted the room that was in their model during the redesign and replaced the new room there.

Then also the names and numbers change. That's really, really common. Or your model may have a stray room that's in there that needs to get deleted out, because it's just not supposed to be there. So what we can do is take the rooms from the current model, the rooms from the linked model, and compare those based on the element ID. And you can compare the location. When you compare the element ID, you're going to have rooms that match, rooms that don't match.

You take the rooms that match, you compare those locations for new rooms, or rooms that just didn't exist, rooms you need to place. And then the rooms that match, you make sure that they overlap. And the ones that don't overlap, move them to overlap. The ones that do, check the parameters, make sure they're in sync.

So really it's compare the list of lists, compare locations, and then figure out how to do the different actions that you determine based on whether or not you want to delete a room, move a room, or update parameters.

So this is a portion of that overall picture of that workspace. And this is just looking at lists of lists. And the top portion here is the list from my current model. And you see I'm looking for the linked element ID parameter. And that's giving me a list of element IDs that I stored from the linked model. Using the Equals tool, I'm just seeing if it equals the element ID from the linked model.

By using cross-product for the lacing, I'm able to do all of the lists at the same time. So what that means is for each item-- consider the column on the left, the list of the element IDs in my model. Column on the right is the element IDs in the architectural model. And for each item-- so the first one, ID 10, I'm scanning the entire list to see if ID 10's inside of that list. Because they're not going to be sequential, they're not going to the same, so you're scanning the whole list.

You do that all the way through-- I'm just going to back up a little bit-- and what you're able to do is use the Filter by Boolean Mask to find any one of those that equals true. So as long as they're the same, it's going equal true, and it's going to pull that item and keep a sorted list where they now match.

Then what you need to do is compare the items of the overall lists to the items of your matching list to see what didn't match. If you try to use Filter by Boolean Mask to do that, you're going to get every single instance of what's false. And what happens with that is you get basically, however many rooms in your model, you have that many rooms repeated in a list of not equal. Because every time that you have ID 10, it's going to give me 3, 12, and 11. Does that makes sense?

So you have your two lists, you send them to different directions, and then you look at the geometry location. This is one that I toyed around with for awhile. So I've looked at clashing the points, I've looked at clashing the solids of the room. Element geometry will convert the volume of your room into a block in Dynamo. And you can use is Geometry.DoesIntersect and compare that.

The problem that I've found with that is, if your room boundaries are at the center of the rooms, or at the center of the walls, or if they're in corridors butting up to different rooms, you're going to get intersections of rooms that are adjacent to your room, which really kind of messes up your script. So what I've done is rooms to poly curves, and I turn that into one continuous line as geometry, and I clash those, basically. And that way it's the whole boundary, and it's not just the lines that are against each other. That I've had a lot more success with. And that gives me a list of if my room's sitting on top of the other room.

The other parts of it are, see if the parameters match. And that goes back to doing lists of lists, and set parameter value by name to update them. So I didn't really show anything for that. But the hard one was moving the room. So if I've got a room in my model that's located over here, the architectural model of the room's over here through redesign, I can't just use Set Location on that room. I can't just move it, which I can with a lot of the other families. But I can't copy it. And there's a Copy By Vector node, and that's up here.

So what I do is take the room location from the room in the architectural model, room location from my model, and that creates a vector. And think of that as the two clicks for the Copy to Move command. And so you're just going to move your room from one to the other, get all the parameters of the room that you're copying from. And then there's a custom node from Archi-Lab that deletes elements. You can use that and it will delete the old room.

So now go back to applying finishes with Dynamo and actually get out of PowerPoint for a while and hang out and Dynamo. Are there any questions on rooms syncing? OK.

So we're first going to talk about flooring. Placing floors in Dynamo is really simple. I've got a workspace here. It's called floor simple. And I did upload all these, and I apologize for sending that email to everybody right before the meeting with the Google Drive link. Also, lesson learned, don't send an email to 190 people that are at a conference. My inbox is just bloated with auto-responses. So I'm learning things soon.

But what I can do is select Model Elements. This is the node to make a room. I need curves, a floor type, and a level. I'm going to hit Select, I'm going to cross-select and select these detail lines. Now over here, you can see I immediately have a floor. I hope somebody calls BS on me, that that is not faster than drawing a line. Because I would have had to open Dynamo-- or draw a floor-- I would have had to open door Dynamo and draw those lines.

It's not really the point. I wanted to show what's necessary for making the floor. I think it's cool, but it's not as practical. Where it's practical is if we start deriving those floor boundaries from other things. So this one, this is from the springs package, and it gets the elements sketch. Does everybody know what a sketch family is? Just a show of hands so I know. OK, there were enough that didn't raise their hands.

Sketch families. Any time you're in an editing mode-- so like, you make a floor, and you draw the lines around the boundary of the floor, it has to be a continuous boundary. That's a sketch-based family. There's a node that collects those lines from those families.

So something typical in health care is having a ceiling or a floor finished that follows along like a curve outside of a room. So what we can do is hit Select Elements. Select Elements, I could pick the ceiling, it found the sketch of the ceiling. What's interesting is the ceiling itself also holds that level. So now I'm not just working to figure out what level it needs to be on, I just pick the ceiling, it placed the floor, and the correct location for that floor. So I can start working from that.

Again, going back to our process where we're collecting information inside of rooms. We can select a room. We can find the room finish boundary. If early on, I put in what my floor finish is, I'll say LVT1. There's my schematic plan. And immediately inside of my model, I have LVT1 inside of the room.

What it did is found the boundary of the room to make the curves that I needed for my wall-- or for my floor. And I know that room is either going to be completely bound, and it's always going to have that enclosed loop, or there's not going to be anything, and it's not going to work at all. But at least 80% of time I'm going to make that floor correctly.

The other thing I was able to do is find the level. One thing about that, I used Get Parameter Value By Name for level, and I found the level of the room. It's different than the ceiling. The ceiling gives me an actual level. Rooms give you text of what the level name is. Odd thing.

There's a custom node from Archi-Lab that's Get Level By Name. So you use that node, gives you the level. I'll show a few different ways of getting levels throughout this. Really, the whole point is being able to get information from one thing that you select, put in, and use it.

And then floor type. I use Floor Type By Name, which is a out-of-the-box node from Dynamo. And it'll find the floor type based on the floor finish name that you put in there. Now, this can get a lot better and be a lot more powerful if I look at all the rooms.

So here, we've got a typical plan. Sometimes we'll show actual floor finishes during design development if we have a concept. Maybe there's circles in the hallways that we're working with. So I can ignore certain rooms. So if I want it modeled, what I did is I can Select.

I put a yes no parameter. I'm going to say that I want to ignore this corridor room. I've also already modeled a finish for this exam room. So I'm going to do the same thing and say, let's ignore that exam room. And this room as well. Inside Dynamo, I'm going to get all the rooms in our model, I'm going to hit Run.

While we're doing this, I am going to jump back to PowerPoint and show a couple things about this. Let's see. Hopefully she's listening because we are live streaming, but I have to thank our receptionists, [? Mariah ?] [? Shore ?] She found this example, or this image. I wanted to use this as a great analogy for filtering.

So what I did is got all the rooms inside of the model. That includes all the rooms of every face. That includes all the rooms that have been deleted, all the rooms that are redundant, not placed. Those are all going to create warnings that are going to break my script. I like to call those turtles.

This is a diagram of a TED. Are there any commercial fishermen in the crowd that are going to call me out when I give a terrible analogy of what this is? Cool. So a TED, it's a device that's on a fishing net. So as a commercial fishing group pulls their net along, and they're scooping up fish, it blocks turtles from getting in, and it keeps them from getting in trouble for having a bad catch. Those turtles to me are what's going to be the bad catch on our script. They're going to make it not work.

So a room that's not placed doesn't have square footage, it's going to create a null value. Hopefully we're done. Yeah. So here that ran. If I change to our color finish floor plan. And now we have floor finishes instead of all of our rooms pretty quickly. You can see they show up in 3D.

A little bit about this and what we did. We got all those rooms-- and then here's what I mean by filtering. We're able to find out anything that I checkboxed as ignore. And so those couple of rooms I said I wanted to ignore, I found out if I selected them. And then here I'm able to filter, and I get a list of all the rooms that I want to work with, and a list of those three rooms that I said I want to ignore.

Same thing then. I look for rooms that don't have a square footage. What I do is Get Parameter Value By Name, I find the square footage. And you can see there's some blanks in there. Those are rooms that have been deleted, those are rooms that are redundant. There's a couple of different ways of why that would happen, but what I do know is that's going to make my script not go all the way through.

So here, I'm able to look and see if any of them are over one square foot, because I doubt I have a room that's smaller than one square foot. I replaced any of the nodes. This is another use of filtering, but I replaced those blanks. Because you can see here, there's number nine, there's nothing here, it creates a null. I replace that with false.

Then over here, I can look, and I've got a list of all my rooms that have square footage, and a list of all the rooms that have been deleted. These are in here because I've ran this script a few times on this file, so you get a bunch of extra rooms. But that's filtering.

So I can look for different things with filtering. I can also look for rooms that don't have floor finished filled out. I can look for keywords. Like this one, we'll say ETR if there's a room that doesn't get a finish and it's existing to remain. So anything that I say that has ETR, I can ignore. And there's one room that I had ETR on, so I'm not going to make a finish for that.

But then what I can do is read those floor finishes. And up here, I'm reading the list of floor finishes. And those are all the ones in my model. What I love about this is I don't have to make the floor type before hand. I package pretty much everything together in one script.

So I read that list of types and I found I've got a typical material that I duplicate from. I duplicated that material. Looks like I had all my materials in here. But I duplicate it and made a material for each one of those floor types. I was able to use a floor type that I started from, duplicate that floor type by the number of floors in my list, and so I made all the floor types while I was doing that script.

And that again is kind of that power Dynamo, being able to just take it, and go as far as you can with as few inputs as possible. So all somebody had to do was input text of LVT1, and I was able to make the floor type, the material, make the floor inside of the room, and fairly quickly.

So back on the wall finishes, very similar. If we had to make an accent wall, what we're using is a thin wall type with a material applied to it. This is one of those areas I've looked at a lot of things. We try to look at what works both internal and external of the architectural model and length model. Us being multi-discipline, we have the luxury of being in the same model if we want to. So that's where things like Split Face work, and the Paint Bucket tool.

But if you're in a linked model, that doesn't work. So we're trying to get to a standard workflow within the firm. So we're able to place these walls. And if I do that, I'm going to Create Similar. I can use the Pick Wall tool. I can pick my wall. It's going to place it where it's going to be. And then I can use the Join tool. Wrong wall. And join that to the adjacent wall, and that's going to cut it out.

So that's what we're doing now with Dynamo. Let me open this up. With Dynamo, we can read that room finish parameter. Just like the floors, we can make the material, we can make the wall type, and we can look at the surrounding things around the room and Auto Join. So this one's not as quick as I'd like it to be, but it does save a lot of steps. And it also creates a level consistency.

So if I come in here and, real quick, add a-- I can pick my room. I can select the individual lines where I want my wall finish to go. I can click to place the wall. And what it did is Auto Place that wall for me. I can, if I input the finish first, before I click on it. So here I can put wall finish, I'm going to say this is PT2. I'll select my room, continue.

And what that is, make the filter that we have that colors our individual walls. So if I look at Visibility Graphics I can go to Filters. And this, as it placed-- why is this locked out? I'm going to try that again. That was weird. Yeah, I'm not trying to change it. I should be able to scroll through, but.

OK. So you can see that it applied PT2 as an actual View Template to the view. And it found a wall type that's type name equals PT2, assigned a color. What we have is a list of standard BSA LifeStructures colors that we have so PT1 is consistent early on in a project. So Dynamo opened up our Excel file. This gives us our typical number, the RGB value. It created that color from that standard list.

So it got pretty powerful. What it did is pick the room, read the finish of the room, made the wall type and the material, created a View Filter, applied the View Filter. The other thing I really got excited about with this is, View Filters-- I didn't realize that View Templates were just a view. So I was able to look at our view, find out if there's a View Template on it. If there isn't one, I use an IF statement to not use the View Template. And then add that View Filter to the View Template. So even if I was using View Templates for everything, it made that filter, which to me is really nice.

Taking it a little bit further, I can select this wall. And we'll give it an actual appearance. One thing with this is, I checkbox Use Render Appearance to make sure that that render appearance matches the color of what the actual material is. So we're going to change this to a nice shade of red.

So as we progress through our project, the first time we're placing finishes it's usually locations that we're worried about. We may not have picked out the color yet. But once we get those colors in, we do try to show that line to match the color, because graphically, it starts making a pleasing diagram.

So I can read that material color that was placed on there. Oh, it went to green. I didn't let that update. Let's just pick red. Let's try that again. You can see that it changed my filter to match what the color was. You can do that and apply it to legends, and start really kind of taking it further. And it's again, just keeping this information alive as you go along with your project.

Kind of moving along here. This one's a total work in progress for me. Right now we're clicking and placing wall protection. But one of the very first questions I get every time I show any of this is, can you do it with wall protection. And it's kind of fun, so I'm going to show it anyways.

All right, so if I click Run, I can Select a wall, pick which wall protection type I want. I can say which side it's going to be on. I might go ahead and click Extend on one of these. And I'm going to circle to that in a second. So you can see this side is short, and this side's spot on.

The wall joins matter on this. And so if I look at the wall join here, that's a miter. And if I look at the wall join up here, this one's butted up. So if I select it, you can see the wall actually stops short. So Dynamo, by me selecting the wall, looks at that line of what was drawn on the wall. And when it's mitered, it looks in here. It's in the notes, it's in the script. I think I may have it in PowerPoint too.

But there's a Python code that was put out there too-- when you select a wall, it looks at what the wall conditions are. And so by that clicking Extend on the one, this was able to extend it half the distance. I didn't click it on this, so it didn't move it. But Dynamo's going to read if that end condition's mitered or not, and if it's joined or not. And so that's letting you kind of auto place this information as you go along.

The other thing that it did-- and I'll just show this diagrammatically. The direction of the wall matters. To be able to be consistent, looking at where that piece of wall protection lands, if somebody draws the wall and clicks Left to Right or Right to Left, that determines where your wall protection is going to fall.

So what I did inside of that script is looked at both ends. So if you select your wall, it finds the whole line of the wall. We look at both ends, and we're able to compare them, and I just put an arbitrary dot 10,000 feet off to the left and up. And it sorted the points by proximity to that dot. And so then I was able to consistently always know that the left side starts over here, and the top starts up here.

Then using the Translate, I was able to push this line up, and use that Geometry Does Intersect node to find out where it's hitting along this wall. And that creates the segments of that wall protection that I needed. And then it places wall protection.

One thing. The script that's in the folder just does one line. If you want to take this a lot further, what I'm showing here is that line is taken up at 4 feet, and it's running through. If you have things like windows in your wall, they're not going to place. You need to do it individually for the different pieces of wall protection. I'll probably send something out or post something at some point on that. But basically, you just send different lines along the way based on where the mounting height of that wall protection is, and you find out where and what is placed.

So here, let's say that maybe I create a new door. And now my wall protection's not expanded across the door. Again, with Dynamo, the key thing that I did is, at the end, I set a bunch of parameters. And I stored all those selections from that initial form. So what I can do is click Synchronize and just rerun the same script on the selections that I had.

I'll say that we've been lucky so far, but I am nervous that something's going to break at some point. All right, so here we're able to just click Run. What Dynamo's doing is taking all of the wall protection inside of my model, looking at it, comparing it to element IDs of linked items. And then it takes the same results that I put in to place each run of wall protection, and it compares the number of segments along that wall to the number of actually placed segments. If there's too many segments of wall protection, it deletes a couple of the segments. If there's not enough segments of wall protection, it makes a couple of new segments, and then applies everything from there.

So here I just created a list of sync results. And so it says two segments were synced, and there were two initially on there. One segment of wall protection was added to those walls. Take a second. It gives the report first and then it updates. And you see my wall protection's not in front of my doors. If I delete a door again, run the same thing.

I'll go in PowerPoint while it's doing that. So here's a diagram, as far as the synchronization goes. It's find the number of number of segments on the host wall, number of segments on the protection. Compare them, delete, and add. And then compile your results. It's surprisingly simple. It took me forever to pull together. But it conceptually wasn't too bad.

Next thing I do want to talk about is signage. I kind of loathe signage at times. Because it should just be associated with the door. But because interior design is in different models, I can't always just make a door schedule and say that it gets this sign with it. There's no Copy Monitor tool inside of Revit to copy monitor doors.

The majority of signs are associated to a door. So I use Dynamo to place signs with doors. And then we place the couple of fringe ones and coordinate from there. And let's see what we did here. I'm going to close that.

So for signage, I'm going to open a script. So for signage, if I hit Run-- and this works across linked models or a current model-- I can select the doors. And the hard part with these is I can't really put a face-based family with that door, because where the door's at, there's nothing there. It's already cut out the wall.

So what I have is a non-hosted family that gets placed on top of the door, reads the rotation and orientation of the door, places a signage family along the door, and stores the information where the door location is. So if I click Finish, pick which signage type. So I just have a nameplate loaded in here. And I can say that I want this to be on the bottom edge. Click Place Signs. And you can see that it placed that sign along the door. Inside of the parameters I've got that this sign was created by Dynamo, and I've got the linked element ID.

All right. I'm going to close out, I'm going to open the synchronization. While it's doing that, the one thing that I am really proud of in this, is I looked at the To Room and From Room parameter, and I just gave it a couple of words to look for. Hallway and corridor, anything that, typically, I know that that sign is going to be on the corridor side. I also know that it's usually reading the room beyond it.

I'd love to just use the To Room and From Room parameter of doors, but they're rarely modeled to actually work with that. If somebody has successfully done it on every project, congrats. That's fantastic. But what I can do is delete a door. Maybe they deleted the door, put a new one in, or a different one, or they move a door. I can run the sync. This, similar to our wall protection, gives me a list of information about what happened on the synchronization process.

I know that two doors had signs that synced. And when I hit OK, the sign's going to move to the door. This sign, because a new door was on there, and it wasn't the same element ID, rather than try to delete it or do something, I just overwrote it to be red so I know I need to deal with it. I have another workspace in here that helps me along the way.

I didn't read through all those notes, but it basically says that blank signs were not associated with a door. They show up as red. Use the Signage Reassociator to pick a new door that's on there, or delete the door. So I can click Run, pick that sign that's not hosted, pick the door it's supposed to go with, pick Host. And now it's moved over with that door. It's got the information with the door.

What's fun about it is I put a parameter in there tied to the model text. And I read that To Room and From Room parameter and automatically put the room name and number with that sign. So a lot of the stuff that we're doing is trying to be able to take advantage of VR And programs like Endscape have been huge for us to be able to want to do this sort of thing. So there's things like that we can quickly show and put the information in there. The final piece with that, we've got a whole bunch overridden things. I put another script in there that just clears the overrides.

And so if we go through, I can click Clear Overrides. Click Run. And now my doors and signs go back to normal. I'm able to graphically look at my plan and quickly see which signs are there. The one nice thing is, the example I showed highlighted red the sign with the door that was deleted. But that's also going to pick the signs that you've placed arbitrarily throughout the building. So you can quickly see all the way finding signs. You can take it as far as you want to. This is just kind of an example with doors.

So the one major thing when you're doing all this, you will have rooms that may extend past ceilings. You may have some wall finishes that extend above your ceiling as well. The other thing too is, if you place finishes on top of finishes, they are usually not cut out from each other. That's a process that you have to do. I've got a synchronization to fix some of the things that we have. But the bigger part is to read the rooms to see what finishes are in there, and apply those to our room tags

Let's see how this goes. The odds of this freezing or breaking are high, so we're going to go for it. I'm going to go ahead and draw a floor inside of this room. Actually, make sure I'm on the right work set. It's going to put an accent circle inside of this room. Click Finish.