Immaterial? I don't think so

This is a follow-up post to Immaterial? from almost a year ago. I promised to write about a new method we’re employing in one of my comments but got too busy. Finally I’m getting around to it. Be warned: it’s long.

I originally held off posting to see whether 2012 would bring any solutions on this front but that didn’t happen. At least now the bottom of the Custom Parameters section adjusts with the Materials dialog…hurray!

The least-worst solution I prefer is ugly workaround #1 as mentioned in the previous post. I hit a serious snag while experimenting but finally got through it. I like to refer to this methodology as the Materials sample board concept. Think about your office for a minute: you probably have a vast library of samples. This is analogous to the Materials dialog in your Revit project file. You don’t use all materials in your library in every project, nor do you schedule all materials used in your finish schedule (Ex: insulation, gypsum board, etc.). The same applies to Revit projects. Even assuming every material was actually used in some form or fashion, you’d want to only schedule a select few as finishes, which requires some filtering mechanism.

When crafting office-wide workflows, you have to be careful to keep things simple. This is a hard thing to do when the tools don’t do exactly what you want. So compromise is absolutely necessary in order to arrive to the best-possible solution. It won’t be perfect or satisfy every requirement, but will result in an improvement over how things are done today.

We all understand materials sample boards: designers pick paints, flooring materials, ceilings, glass, cladding, masonry & brick finishes etc. and present them on a board to get client approval. Those materials then find their place in the project, usually within room finish schedules, tagged elevations, etc. So my goal was to extend that concept into Revit. Presentation of those materials was not at all considered as you just cannot achieve that through print.

As discussed before, Revit will only schedule a material if it is used on a placed object. So the starting idea was to place “material swatches” in the project template and make them very difficult/impossible to delete by mistake, without resorting to obtuse ways of concealment such as through worksets, phasing or design options. This was a very important requirement so everything could be pre-set in the template, including the finish schedules. It was also very important to have the same materials used in the material finish schedule as materials in the objects themselves and utilize built-in & custom material parameters to store information that we want to see scheduled such as Manufacturer, Color, Pattern, etc. This would open up possibilities of building material libraries per client and/or project type to be re-used in the future.

Another important requirement was grouping of finishes by surface/object, such as Floor, Walls, etc. Since various materials (such as paints) could be used on different surfaces, it was also essential to have the ability to add unique schedule notes to each material in each application, which meant that this information could not be stored within the material itself. This issue, coupled with concealment methods, turned out to be a head-scratcher.

Material Swatches

The starting point was a simple generic model family that was to be placed multiple times in the template. After several iterations and reasons, it became clear that shared and nested families were required. Each shared “swatch” was nested multiple times into a base family that would represent the application/surface of those materials.

Multiple types were then placed in the template and editing these family types becomes the UI when building the finishes information. Type Comments is used for the schedule sub-headers and Schedule Order is for defining which application order is displayed in the material schedule.

In this example, I have 5 placeholder materials for each application but of course you could add more to suit your needs. Since we have 8 applications, 8 instances were placed in the template. The solid geometry of the swatch family was then set to not be visible and finally reloaded, making them completely invisible and unselectable.

Concealment

Here are some interesting family facts that made all this possible:

• If family geometry is made to not be visible, material take-off schedules still pick up the materials used and properly report quantities (volumes/areas of materials on non-visible solids are excluded). Hence the use of this technique will not skew your take-offs.
• Families are selectable in-canvas even with no visible geometry unless all reference planes are set to “Not a Reference”.

These are the key elements needed to let us place “swatches” to host finish materials and prevent accidental deletion. Note that one can still pick the family in the browser and delete it, but you also get a warning that you’re about to delete “x families”, so it would be a deliberate mistake or done purposefully and not accidentally.

Material Facts

As mentioned in the other post, only the material name can be used in room schedules. Revit does not permit duplicate names so this can be used very effectively as a “Type Mark” since duplication cannot occur. The only hitch is that you cannot rename a material in the schedule: you have to rename it in the Materials dialog.

By using the Material Class, you can isolate the materials that represent finishes to make navigation easier.

In the above picture I’m also highlighting a big shortfall in Revit: the inexistence of multi-value parameters. For example walls in certain rooms often receive multiple finishes: a paint and ceramic tile or FRP panels. My workaround is to create materials whose name represents a group of multiple finishes. This is solely used in room schedules. For the record, this is not something I’m happy about! However there’s no other way to achieve this and when using text parameters, we’re essentially doing the same thing.

The Finishes Schedule

To build a material take-off schedule (for Generic Models) to filter only the materials in the “material sample board”, I simply filtered for shared parameter “Schedule Order” as “parameter exists”, which is also used for sorting the application order (Floors, Base, etc.).

Conclusions

So why all this pain you ask? Well, keep in mind that once this is set in your project template, all it takes is for users to pick the materials and edit as necessary or create new ones. It also opens up the possibility to save material libraries rich with information that can be re-used. Not to mention that with material tags that read the material name, you’ll have flawless coordination with the “type marks” used in your finish material schedule. Room finishes can also utilize these materials in lieu of text parameters, although for multiple finishes you have to resort to the workaround mentioned above. Finally, we also have to make another check: that each finish that shows up in the finish material schedule is actually used in the project since these are manually added. For this purpose we also set up a “checking sheet” that contains a series of filtered schedules to make sure no finishes have been missed or added. Obviously it would be great if things were all automatic, but at this point this is as good as it’s going to get.

Immaterial? I don't think so

Immaterial?

Materials in Revit are a source of frustration, at least for me.

When it comes to documenting a project as it evolves from SD to subsequent, more detailed phases, Revit fails to provide a solid solution that acknowledges the need for continuity in documentation. Not that there are no ways around the issue, but we’re not after disconnected workarounds in the end. We want a solution that provides seamless integration between the 3D model and visualization aspects, and the documented information such as material schedules.

Let’s take rooms as the prime example. In itself, a room is not a physical object that exists on it’s own. You cannot buy a “room”: it is made up of walls, floors, finishes, ceilings, lights, electrical fixtures, casework, furniture…you get the point. Traditionally, we schedule room finishes in tabular format with a column for each element of interest. Now we can argue whether this is or is not the best way to show finishes, but guess what? We’re not going to change how the industry expects it just because Revit wants you to do it differently perhaps!

So how does one integrate the Materials in Revit with the documentation expectations? Over the years (and recently too) I have toyed around with several ideas but they all break somewhere:

• We can add a Material parameter to the room category. This gives us access to the actual Materials through a room object or a room schedule. Since a material parameter is a text entry pointing to a material name, it is easy to modify and doesn’t require you to take a trip to the Materials dialog if you know the material name.

• The first issue we encounter with the above is that we can only schedule the material name through the room schedule. We expect to see names such as “CPT” for carpet etc. in the room finish schedule. To work around this, we can name our materials in abbreviated form and also assign a common Material Class to easily filter these “Scheduled Finishes” from any other materials used for visualization. The advantage of using real materials is that if we decide to change the type mark or keynote, it will update anywhere that material is used/tagged in the project. This gets us closer to using Materials throughout the entire project lifecycle and not just for visualization.

Some comments about the above image: When are we going to see that darn Custom Parameters area be resizable instead of just tall enough for one parameter?? Also if you’re going to give us a Keywords parameter, let us schedule it! Otherwise what’s the point? Perfect use case: schedule filtering (ex: Keyword contains “Floor”). However for the time being, we have to add a custom project parameter assigned to Materials in order to do this (and scroll!).

• We need to schedule the materials used in the project together with relevant information, such as Manufacturer, Line, etc. However unless materials are used in a model element that is placed in the project, they won’t schedule. Sadly, rooms are not seen as a model element, so creating a Room Material Take-off schedule is out of the question (big bummer). In SD, I don’t care about the area or volume of material used (for documentation purposes, we hardly ever care except if we’re doing detailed cost analysis), but I care about the material description, the manufacturer, etc. I don’t want to schedule every single finish that exists in the Materials dialog, but only those called out in the Room Schedule. So having some sort of “Material Schedule for Rooms” is sorely lacking in Revit. If this were possible, one could schedule materials as they’re added to rooms.

During SD, we only have a limited amount of modeled information. Simply put, the need for “documentation continuity” mentioned earlier means that as the design is refined and the information granularity increases, it needs to find its place in the documentation infrastructure that already exists in the project. For example if all I know is that I’m using paint P1 on walls in Room A100, I need to show P1 as my wall finish in A100 in a room schedule and once that happens, the material schedule should automatically add material P1 to it with all the relevant info. about that material. As design progresses and we pick a real material, that information should be reflected in the material rendering appearance and parameters, resulting in richer, coordinated visualization and construction documentation.

How are firms doing this right now? Unless I’m missing something and there’s actually a way to achieve what I’m describing, we can safely say that firms are doing it the old way: just type it and coordinate manually. This is just not acceptable with all the BIMwashing and hype out there.

Currently, possible ugly workarounds include:

1. Making fake model families (ex: Generic Models) in some unused future phase and assign materials to them. This is synonymous with a physical “Material Sample Board” which is a standard thing in the industry. Now you create a material take-off schedule for the Generic Model category and go from there. However now we’re starting to have disconnected information: Just because a material schedules doesn’t mean it has been called out in a room schedule, and vice versa. Note that a similar technique is to use Design Options to segregate/hide these workaround elements in lieu of Phasing.
2. Typing it! Can’t get uglier than that. With this solution (sadly, the most common one), you manually type up & draft a finish schedule in a drafting view, which you then have to manually coordinate with materials used in modeling elements, room finish schedule dumb text parameters, tags, etc. This is as un-Revit-like as it gets!
3. Adding a zillion project parameters to the room category for each individual finish material application (floor, base, etc.) and then multiplying that by about 5 more (each one will need a unique description, manufacturer, etc.). Also with this you end up having to create separate schedules for each material application (Ex: walls) and…the actual Revit materials still have no connection to this information! This is the current solution we’re using in lieu of #2. It’s workable, but still not pretty. There are a lot of schedule gymnastics that need to happen to make it somewhat efficient.

Other shortfalls crop up while trying to make this work, such as the inability to have nested key schedules and the inability to use shared parameters in key schedules. But I’ll stop here today! Hopefully it is clear enough that we’ve exhausted a lot of avenues trying to get this to work and even though we build projects successfully, the software fails us from a BIM point of view. Despite these problems, we still love it and hope it gets better.

Immaterial?

Volume Frenzy

In my last post I made mention to some behavior I ran across when scheduling volumes. The reported figures varied when scheduling Volume or Material: Volume, so I set out to study Revit’s logic. Note that Material: Volume is available in a Material Take-Off schedule, which is the schedule type used for these tests.

To understand the behavior, I ran 3 scenarios by creating a simple family made up of a 1’x1’x10’ solid and then scheduled it. Here are the first set of findings based on the solid’s LOD (Level of Detail):

Next I added a 1’x1’x1’ “control” solid to further understand how these two volume parameters look at solids in families. This control solid was set to Fine only for now (in the same family).

Lastly, I set the control solid to both Coarse and Fine.

As you can see, these values vary depending on the LOD of solids within your families. So you have to be very careful how you build them if you intend to use them for quantity take-offs. I guess you can now understand why I used the word “Frenzy” in the post title ;)

I personally think this logic is a little crazy, but I’ll be eager to read your comments. At least now you have an in-depth study of Revit’s “logic”. Now on to a summary in words:

1. For an object to schedule in a Material Takeoff Schedule, there HAS to be a solid set to Fine detail. A regular schedule doesn’t have this requirement.
2. Material: Volume reads the Total of Fine solids.
3. Volume reads the Total of Fine solids if no Coarse and or/Medium solids exist. Otherwise, it first reports the Total of Coarse solids and if there are none, it reports the Total of Medium solids.
4. There's no clear cut winner of which is the most reliable parameter. My suggestion? If you want to schedule the volume of particular solids, make sure to set their LOD to Fine and then use Material: Volume. Why? Because it has less obtuse rules!

So I ask myself: instead of these “fuzzy” rules, why not have parameters built into each family template which we would use to control what and how volume is scheduled?

PS: Thanks to Daniel for the extensive brainstorming ;)

Volume Frenzy