Defining rooms and levels in a BIM design software

Defining rooms and levels in a BIM software: how to define room characteristics and managing levels by setting a building’s elevation with an architectural BIM design software

BIM technology has changed and is definitely still changing the design skills involved in the building and management industry in better. This is mainly because it involves a work approach that optimizes the use of available information and resources allowing to speed up and increase the productivity of the professional roles interested in a given project. All this is mainly due to the immediacy with which, thanks to digital technologies, we can get the main basic information about each individual object and, if necessary, change them just as quickly.

Working with BIM design software

In a BIM software, the conditions to create a single project in the shortest time possible and in the most reliable manner, are determined by the complete management of the building levels and room personalization. In particular, let’s take a look at how to input the floor slabs, define the room or compartment characteristics, manage the various levels by setting the elevation heights and copy items from one floor to another using a BIM software for architectural design such as Edificius by ACCA software.

Defining rooms and levels

Let’s start off by drawing a floor slab. To do this, simply select the Horizontal envelope object and with a left mouse button click on the inner face of the element (beam, column, etc) simply trace the first poly-line segment of the slab.

: Opening the objects menu

: Creating a building envelope

: Creating a building envelope – step 2

When the second end of the segment is correctly positioned, we can now do a second click to set its final position and then proceed with drawing the second section of the polyline.

: Creating a building envelope – step 3

: Creating a building envelope – step 4

At this stage we can now click in our drawing space to place the second end of the second poly-line section and continue step by step in the very same way until we get to the final polyline segment.

: Creating a building envelope – step 5

: Creating a building envelope – step 6

Let’s now define the last poly-line segment and then end this first phase with Finish selecting it from the local pop-up menu and therefore complete our slab.

: Creating a building envelope – step 7

: Creating a building envelope – step 8

If we need to define a slab object with a particular shape (for example with curved sides) you can simply select one of the poly-line segments and with a right mouse button click, select Convert to Arc from the pop-up menu options.

: Creating a building envelope – step 9

: Creating a building envelope – step 10

Room properties

Now let’s see how easy it is to assign the properties for each area of the building by defining the various rooms and compartments. With the “Room” object, you can define the building’s internal areas by automatically acquiring basic geometrical data, such as, surfaces, volumes, etc. To assign a room property to a given area simply select the Room function from the objects menu and then proceed to applying it to a specific area with a left mouse button click.

: Rooms in Edificius: Menu

: Rooms in Edificius: Selection

Each of the room tags can be freely edited from the properties toolbox where materials, characteristics and colours can also be changed.

: Rooms in Edificius: Properties

: Rooms in Edificius: Resulting view

Level properties

Another feature of the Edificius BIM software that simplifies the user’s work is having complete control of the levels settings. For multi-storey buildings, the useful Levels and sublevels manager allows the user to freely add, delete and change the levels that configure the project with great flexibility by specifying elevations and inter-plane heights.

Edificius levels manager

Other useful features, allow the user to view entities inserted on a different level with the Background toolbox. With appropriate settings, entities inserted on a different level can be made visible as a background proving to be useful reference for drawing upon or for defining elements at a different level.

Edificius levels: first floor plan

In this particular case, the drawing snap aids are also active to simplify entity entry.

Edificius levels properties

In a floor plan’s drawing model, you can also copy already drawn entities to a different drawing model. This powerful feature is accessible from the Copy Entities toolbox where you can easily specify the source levels, the entities to copy and the destination levels to copy to.