preparing a Revit model for Ecotect

Autodesk Sustainable Design Curriculum
Video Tutorial Two: Revit Prep
(followed partially with project 1: house model)

Step 1: Open completed house model in Revit

Step 2: Under the manage tab in project settings select project information. Select edit-energy data.

Energy data will be exported to the gbXML file.  The building type will effect scheduling of the energy, postal code sets a default location, ground plane assumes everything below that level is underground, The sliver space tolerance will allow gaps between the spaces if the gaps are over 1ft (the default setting) it will be considered an exterior face of the room. Because we are focusing on a house I chose a single family and oxford's postal code and used the default settings for the rest.
(this step can also be done at the very end when the file is being exported)


























Step 3:  Still under the manage tab in project location select location.
Select the tab place and enter the city closest to your location, if one does not exist you can enter a latitude and longitude.

Step 4: Under the home tab in the room and area location select the drop setting area and volume computations.

Verify that areas and volumes are being calcuated for the gbXML file, also that the room area computation is at wall center

Step 5 is very important, and fixes the problem that was encountered in the previous post of this blog.  In this step you must make sure that you have defined rooms correctly in your project.

Step 5: Entering the plan views (in the home tab) select the room under room & area.  At this point the message rooms are currently not visible in the view. do you want to make them visible? may appear if you have not defined any rooms yet. select yes.  This puts you into an editing mode where you can move the mouse towards the middle of each room and click which will highlight the room in blue.  Make sure that the upper limit is correct, the default is level one, because this project has two levels I needed to select level two.  Do this for every room in your project.

I got a message about the area with staircase overlapping and wanted to make sure that the room was defined correctly, to do this i chose a section view of the stair case.  Under view-view properties-edit visibility/graphics overrides i selected room and expanded it by pressing the + button and selected color fill, interior fill, and reference.  Now I can see the defined space of the room highlighted in blue.
This can also be done on the floor plan views to double check that every room is defined

Step 6: If you have not named your rooms this is a helpful (but not necessary) step because each room will be visible/editable in Ecotect.
The easiest way to do this is to create a room schedule.  In the view tab select-schedule-schedule/quantities-rooms (pick area, level, name etc.).
Now you can edit the name of each room (selecting the room will highlight it in the plan views)

Step 6: Export as gbXML file (can fix/do step 2 during this)

in the details tab you can see all the rooms you've created/named, this will show you possible errors that might exist in your model

in my case there was an error message (Room Volumes Overlap, adjust Upper Limit and Upper Offset.) in the spaces that included my stairs. I am not sure if this will prevent it from importing to Ecotect, or end up giving a false analysis of the building.  I will discuss the outcome in the next post.