Placing Room Tags and Room Separator Lines in Revit Modeling

Rooms in Revit are three-dimensional elements that are defined typically by walls, or what are called room separator lines. In our project, we only have a few different spaces that we're going to define here, but it'll give you a good idea of how these work so we can apply it to larger applications. The first thing I'm going to do is go to my Annotate tab, and I just want to show you that there's also a room tag, which is an element that we can add onto a room after the fact, but the beauty is we have the option to allow it to add that tag as we place the rooms.

The reason I'm showing you this is because I want you to understand that rooms and room tags are two separate elements, so they are not one and the same, and it's a pretty common misconception that the room tag is the room element itself. From Architecture, we've got the option to place a room, so I'll just kind of click on that tool, and when you see the options that I'm given for placing the room, you can see that tag on placement is set. There's also this option for placing rooms automatically, and I've never been able to use that with great success, even on a small project like we see here.

So, it's always best to place them manually because then we can control the placement by adding in the room name and the room number as we see fit. The first thing I'll do is place my first room. You can see it's called Room 1, and you may have guessed it, but the next one I place is going to be called Room 2, and when I go into here, what I want to do is I really want to have a family room and a kitchen in the same space, but if you look at the blue outline that's being highlighted, you can see it's taking up all of the same space in here.

So, before I place this room, what I need to do is add a room boundary line, and that is done with the Room Separator. If I hit escape, it'll take me out of that room command, and from my Architecture tab again, I'll see Room Separator. What I could do is draw this line, say from the edge of my refrigerator here, and I can go vertically until I hit the centerline wall, and now I have two different spaces here because this wall and this room separator are going to create my family room space.

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When I go to Room now, you can see here that it's going to break at that room separator. So, that'll be Room 3, and then we have Room 4, which is going to represent our kitchen area, and then Room 5, which will represent our bathroom. Now you can see that they're all just called Room right now, and that's not a problem because we can go in, and if I pick the tag, you can see there's two different options that we can change here, the room number and room name.

If I wanted to change this to Bedroom, I could select it, and I can change it to Bedroom, and I'll do the same for all the other rooms. This will be our Family Room, then our Kitchen, and finally, our Bathroom here, and you'll see really quickly that there's not enough space in this room for the tag because it's just covered up by so many other model elements. What we can do here is we can move this tag outside of the space, but first, we need to activate an option for our tag, called Leader.

If I click on Leader, then what I can do is I can take my room tag by using this drag grip here, you can see it's kind of like a move symbol, and I can drag my room tag outside of that space, and I have the option to adjust the way it looks by grabbing this grip here, and it'll give me a leader extension and then the leader line here. The other thing we can do is we can add a dot or an arrow at the end of this, and as long as this point stays within the room boundary, we'll be fine. If you notice, if I move it outside, you'll notice my room tag pops up these strange question marks.

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That's because it needs to be within the room space like you see here. Now, to add a leader to this, I can select the tag, and this is universal to a lot of tags within Revit as well. I can select the tag, click edit type, and then where it says leader arrowhead, I can change it to the type that I'm looking for.

So, I'm looking for a filled dot of 1/16th, which is right here, and then I'll hit okay. Now, because that was a type parameter, all of our room tags we've used here, which is just called Room Tag, will all have that dot leader if we use the Leader option. You can see I got a little crazy with my kitchen placement, so I could either adjust my dimension tag or move my kitchen tag slightly, or like I did here, a combination of the two.

And that's how we place room tags. The next video we're going to add all of our dimensions.

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