Running Revit Room Book from Dynamo

Hello everyone,
I would like to know if it is possible to obtain the sum of all the inner surfaces of a room (including,ceiling,beams,walls) in order to estimate the the amount of interior plastering required for the walls.The functionality is already provided by revit room book extention but I would like to acess it from within Dynamo to get more control over it.

Thank you in advance

Hi @SouravGanguli

Show us your attempts. Where did you got stuck.

What are you looking to control?

To be honest I have no idea how to obtain this information with dynamo. I normally use to the room book extension to obtain this information,I was searching for a way to calculate the information within dynamo itself so that I can write the values into custom parameters of the rooms. Since it is a plugin I was guesing the same could be done with dynamo maybe.

Could you drop your dummy rvt file here.

Wall Plaster.rvt (2.0 MB)
Roombook.xlsx (33.6 KB)

Hello,
I have uploaded both the revit file and the excel file obtained by using the Room Book extension, What I would like to do is total the values marked in red in the excel (that is the surface area of the ceiling and Wall,column surfaces) and write it to the project parameter plaster area added to the room.

@SouravGanguli
Please use the search tool with your keywords and come back with something you tried and specific issues around it that we can clearly identify. You could also be interested in reading the guidelines first:

Hello,
My sincere apologies if I have not stated my question properly please forgive me. What I wanted to know was if there was any way to access room book like functionality from within dynamo such as custom node packages etc. I tried searching google for it but nothing turned up.

We could give you some clues indeed, there are tons of related information already online. So let’s say we don’t know how Roombook works: how would you describe the workflow you need with existing Dynamo functions?
[…]
Here are some of the related links that could help to get started on such a project:
This is for walls:

This is for ceilings:

This could be used for the beams:

…along with Element.Geometry and other nodes that you will find here:
http://dictionary.dynamobim.com/#/Revit/Elements/Element/Action/Geometry

You could also need to read this part:
http://dynamoprimer.com/en/05_Geometry-for-Computational-Design/5-8_importing.html

Lastly, you could need a couple of nodes such as Area, Sum and optionally Schedule.GetData from the BimorphNodes package.

If you already know how Dynamo works basically, the best would probably be to find a similar workflow to get started. If not, I would suggest to read the Primer first :slightly_smiling_face:

Another one that could help:

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@SouravGanguli Try the clues given by @Yna_Db. It will help you get started. Then come back here if you get stuck with your graph and error images.

@SouravGanguli Below is a definition that provides results that match your Roombook values for Walls, Floor and Ceiling. Haven’t extracted Door and Window areas, but it should be relatively simple to work out.

Roombook.dyn (24.9 KB)

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Hello,
Thanks for taking the time to look into my questions and for your suggestions. I will try the the suggestions given by you then revert back to you.
I have attached below my attempt at achieving the goal with dynamo but the problem is the values obtained are not matching those obtained from room book. While according to the room reasult the total plaster requirement for the ceiling and the walls is 36(Walls)+13(Ceiling)=49 sqm while according to the Dynamo script it is 44.66 sqm. Therefore there being a difference of almost 4 sqm between the 2 values.Maybe there is a problem with my dynamo graph.
I will try the method suggested by @Vikram_Subbaiah , I think it may be able to solve my problem.

Thank you for all the help till now :slight_smile:Roombook.xlsx (33.5 KB)
Wall Area Plaster_Attempt 1.dyn (19.4 KB)
Wall Plaster.rvt (2.0 MB)

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@Vikram_Subbaiah @SouravGanguli
The results of your comparisons could be interesting for everybody. Would you please give some more explanation about your graphs so that we can quickly see if something is missing and where?

@Yna_Db
I firstly obtained the room geometry from revit as solid with Volume computation turned on in revit. The solid thus obtained did not account for the beams as they are non room bounding therefore I performed a solid difference between the beam geometry and the room geometry this gave me a solid representing the actual volume of the room. After that I used the solid area node to calculate the total surface are of the solid representing the room volume. I the next step I obtained the areas of the doors,windows and floor from the revit room object and subtracted the sum of this values from the total surface area of the solid obtained. This should have given me the total internal plaster area according to my thinking.
Another limitation of this workflow is that it estimates wrongly in case there are room separation lines.

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What is the number prior to removing windows and doors? Would be interesting to get the surfaces of the walls separate from the ceilings so we can try and find the discrepancy. Also have you done the calculation by hand to confirm the room book number? I know t sounds crazy but there may be something else not removed in the roombook calculation for some reason (i.e. windows).

Unlikely, as in the definition I’ve posted above the values obtained in Dynamo match the Roombook values
The files referred to are from this post above.

The solution provided by @SouravGanguli seems to work perfectly on my end and have the advantage to be clearly understandable, which is a good base for optional further developments.

They look like they should be good, but if there was a discrepancy between the roombook values and the Dynamo values on his end I thought it important to track down the reason for the difference.

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Hello everyone,
Thanks for all the help till now. I was manually checking the calculations as suggested by @jacob.small. I came across the following error the area obtained from doors and windows by retrieving the area parameter of the door and windows was substantially more than the actual size of the door window opening, the calculations by room book was correct in this regard and also the calculations by the script provided by @Vikram_Subbaiah.
The attached images highlight the descrepencies-

                                      I was not able to understand what was causing this error in door,window area reporting from revit. I am looking for solutions to the problem one option is to use the heigh and width to calculate the opening.
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Did the door, window area report correctly at your end?