How to Create Revit Room Tags? With Area Calculation

ByMohamed Fakhry Updated

Room Tags are labels that display information about each room, such as its number, name, size, shape, and orientation.

In this tutorial, you will learn how room tags work in Revit and how to easily create and calculate all the rooms in a project in both plan and section views.

Add Rooms

Details: Use the existing floor plan areas to create room boundaries.

Steps

  1. Go to the Architecture tab > Room & Area panel > click Room (Shortcut: RM).
  2. Click inside a closed loop of walls to create a room.

✨ Tip: To generate all rooms in a view: (3. Room panel > click Place Rooms Automatically).

Bounding Elements

Roofs, ceilings, walls, curtain systems, columns, floors, room separation lines, and building pads (replaced by toposolids in Revit 2024).

These are the elements that define the volume of the room. Uncheck the Room Bounding option in the Properties palette to include the space they occupy in the space.

✨ Tip: When working with rooms, open a plan view and a section view > Go to View tab > Windows panel > click Tile Windows (Shortcut: WT). This allows you to see the perimeter of the room (its vertical and horizontal extents) on-screen.

Edit Boundary

  1. Select the elements within the room boundary.
  2. Go to the Properties palette > Constraints panel > Uncheck Room Bounding.
  3. Click Apply.
Press and hold the CTRL key to select multiple elements.

Move Boundary

  1. Click on the Room area.
  2. Click and drag the selected room area to its new boundaries.
  3. In the “Room tag is outside” warning window, click Move to Room.

Change Level

  1. Click on the Room area.
  2. Go to the Properties palette > Constraints panel > Upper Limit drop-down menu.
  3. Change Level 1 or use Limit Offset to assign a height.

Rooms are genuine 3D objects in and of themselves. As a result, they require a Reference Level so that Revit can determine how high they’re placed in the model. A room will embed into the level we applied it on, change the height by assigning values to Base Offset and Limit Offset in the Properties palette.

Some characteristics appear as greyed-out in the Properties palette when we select a room. These attributes, such as the Room’s Area, Volume, and so on, are “Read Only” data.

Separate Rooms

  1. Go to the Architecture tab > Room & Area panel > click Room Separator.
  2. Sketch line/s to divide existing rooms.
  3. Click Room (Shortcut: RM).
  4. Click inside the new division to add a separate room.

If we have an open-plan room that serves multiple functions, such as an open kitchen or a dining area in a living room. How to compute each area independently? If none of the other Room Bounding Elements divide the space, we use the Room Separator tool.

✨ Tip: For more information on how hotkeys can save you a lot of time, see our post on Revit keyboard shortcuts.

Color Rooms

Adding fill schemes to rooms.

  1. Go to the View tab > Graphics panel.
  2. Click Visibility/ Graphics (Shortcut: VV).
  3. Go to the Model Category tab > Visibility panel > expand Rooms.
  4. Check Color Fill > Click OK.
  5. Go to the Annotation tab > Color Fill panel > Click Color Fill Legend.
  6. Insert the legend in the view.
  7. In the Choose Space Type and Color Scheme window, drop-down Space Type menu.
  8. Select Rooms > Click OK.
  9. Click the legend > Go to the Modify | Color Fill Legend tab.
  10. In the Scheme panel, click Edit Scheme.
  11. In the Edit Color Scheme window, change the color value in the Scheme Definition section.
  12. Click OK.

Learn more about Legends

If the color scheme does not appear, it might be hidden by visibility settings, not applied correctly, or hidden by a material surface pattern such as flooring:

  1. Go to the Properties palette > Graphic Display Options.
  2. Click the Edit box.
  3. Under Model Display, decrease the Transparency to 0.

Calculate Area

To measure area in Revit:

  1. Go to the Architecture tab > Room & Area panel.
  2. Click on the arrow of the main menu.
  3. Click Area and Volume Computation.
  4. Computations tab > Volume Computations panel.
  5. Check Areas and Volumes.

Rooms track a number of parameters that affect the heating and cooling of a project. Only when the room components report all areas of the building model, and we include the entire volume of the building model, can we perform an effective energy analysis.

✨ Tip: Turn on volume computation only when it’s time to create and print schedules or other views that display room volumes. Additional live calculations are not good for Revit model performance.

If the rooms are not enclosed or found correctly, a roof volume might be interfering with the room boundaries or thin walls are not in an enclosed chain of wall around that room:

  1. Change the cut plane offset (using the view range) of the plan view to add a room in a closed chain of walls.
  2. Extend thin walls to the centerline of the perpendicular thick wall to ensure a closed room area, then generate the room.

Add Room Tag

Details: Assign new room tags using room boundaries.

Steps

  1. Go to the Architecture tab > Room & Area panel.
  2. Drop-down Tag Room menu.
  3. Click Tag Room (Shortcut: RT).
  4. Click inside the room boundary to add a tag.

Learn more about tags

Room tags are annotations that are visible in both the floor plan and the sectional view. We use this tool to display the name, number, area, and volume of a room.