travel line revit

Monday, July 1, 2019

Travel distance and egress path options in revit.

Egress Path - Revit OpEd

Have you tried? Revit Path of Travel Tool

When working on a building design, many factors must be balanced. One factor that must always be considered is that of life safety, where distances to the exits are essential calculations for compliance with fire codes. Revit 2020 introduced the path of travel tool to assist in measuring travel distance requirements to make fire life safety simple and fast to calculate. Both Revit 2020.1 and 2020.2 added functionality to the path of travel tool to make it even more flexible, helping you analyze exiting distances in your design in a number of ways.

The path of travel tool in Revit lets you select 2 points in a floorplan and calculate the shortest route between those 2 points, avoiding elements you have defined as obstacles. The calculated path uses a 300mm clearance allowance to keep the center of the path from passing too close to an obstacle. The path of travel tool is not able to calculate vertical distances, i.e. it does not work on stairs.

There are 3 primary calculations Revit makes, let’s review:

• Travel Distance Limit: the distance to the nearest exit
• Dead-End Limit : the distance of a corridor with no end exit
• Common Path Limit : the portion of exit access that must be traversed before two separate and distinct paths are available)

The examples shown in the videos below refer to terms in the  NFPA 101 Life Safety Code, but the principles apply to other fire codes.

You can use Path of Travel tools to help you analyze plans for travel distances related to life safety in your designs, but this is only scratching the surface of what you might be able to do. Analyze traffic patterns through a space, organize spaces to facilitate access, find optimal routes for people or other elements, etc — we’d love to hear what you do. Share with us in the comments below if you’ve found a helpful way to use Path of Travel.

Without further ado, here’s a short tutorial on the path of travel tool, starting with how to make life safety calculations.

Maximum travel distance to the nearest exit

Typically, you will be able to narrow down which room(s) are going to have the maximum travel distance in your design.  Use the path of travel tool to verify your assumptions and quantify the actual travel distance. In the video below 2 path of travel lines are added to the most distant corners of the room farthest from the exits. By looking at the schedule view of the path of travel lines, Path ‘A’ ends up being just slightly longer than path ‘B’.

Path ‘A’ goes diagonally through the middle of the room, this may not be realistic when possible furniture placement needs to be considered. In the video below a waypoint (a Revit 2020.2 enhancement) is added to the path of travel line and the path altered so it goes around the edge of the room avoiding possible furniture placement in the room. Once this is considered, Path ‘B’ ends up being a shorter path to an exit.

Dead-End Limit

You can also check for dead-end corridor length. Looking at the same plan from before, a design change has created a dead-end corridor condition. In the video the length is checked by placing a path of travel line from the exit position to the end of the corridor without an exit. In this video you will see a view filter added to the view to change the color of the path of travel line as it exceeds the allowed length of a dead-end corridor.

Common Path Limit

When multiple rooms or spaces share a portion of the exit path it is known as a “common path”. The common path limit is how much of the overall exit path can be part of a common path. Use the path of travel tool to reveal common path conditions in your designs. In the video you see exits from 2 rooms that have a common path before they reach a point where 2 distinct paths to exits are available.

Have a question or cool path of travel use case? Tell us about it in the comments.

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The Revit Less Travelled - tips and tricks

BILT Speaker

Thursday 18 April 2019

Path of travel - the dalek of revit 2020.

Path of Travel - New Feature in Revit 2020

• Fire Escape plans
• Emergency Evacuation plans
• Life Safety plans (USA)

Analysis of Route Analysis

Path Linestyle

• Note that it cannot be deleted or renamed. 
• You can change its Weight, Colour or Pattern
• In this case I've just bumped up the weight to something really visible

• The original line can be changed to 'Path to Outside'
•  A new line 'Path to Stair' could be added

• Revit will again calculate the shortest path (around furniture/fixtures)

• Sadly there does not appear to be anything the user can do about the dot at the start, or the arrowhead - neither of which are very distinguishable with heavy lineweights at any scale above 1:50 (is that 1" to 48' in imperial?).
• Overlapping lines can be moved Backwards/Forwards

Update Paths

• Select a path
• Click on 'Update Path' on the ribbon
• Revit will recalculate it

Move It 

• In this example I moved it partially out of the building (keeping the ends inside)

• Try the 'Update' command
• It may or may not work

• This may be your first experience of a very unhelpful warning that does not tell you why it cannot update the path
• My instinct told me to try again, with the whole path kept inside the building

•  This time it worked

• A gold star to anyone who noticed that the path did not avoid all of the furniture - even on the very first attempt

Split Levels & Dizzying Heights

• The living area is 3 lower than the rest of the house - and this is where Revit has failed to pick up the obstacles.
• The question is, does the furniture project high enough to interrupt the path?

• Click on the tiny, tiny Route Analysis settings arrow

•  The lower height is set to a default value of 203.2mm (8") above the view associated level (upper part of split level)

• This may be just above the furniture, so I tried dropping it to zero, then 'Update' the path
• Computer says 'No'

• Then I tried just above floor level, say 10mm, but it still failed
• The lowest level it would let me go without failing, was 175mm, but it still did not pick up the furniture on the lower floor.
• This time the message was a bit more informative:

The Dalek of Revit 2020

• Strangely there is no 'Comments' property.  This is very unusual, as almost every other element type does have a system Comments property that can be used in almost any situation (Filter, tag, schedule, key schedule etc)
• The only properties that a user can change are the Line Style and Mark
• Time = Calculated time it takes to walk from the start point to the end point of the path of travel. Walking speed is set to 3 mph/1.34 mps (Read only)  [ From help file - mps presumably means metres/second.  I'd prefer 5 kilometres /hour ]
• Length = Total length of all segments of a path (Read only)
• The system properties can tagged

•  And scheduled

• From Room and To Room properties are labelled as 'Not Available'.  In the Autodesk help files, they are labelled as 'For Future Use', which is a promising sign for something to come.
• These must be instance properties
• If you try Type properties, the Lines category is not available

View Filters

• Path of Travel Lines can be filtered by such things as Length, which would be very useful for highlighting paths over specified limits.

• Path of Travel Lines can be filtered by Linestyle, for separating different kinds (in the absence of Types)

Obstructions

• By Discipline
• Show only selected

Path of Travel Calculations

• The Dalek conundrum - how to get up or down stairs
• No system 'Comments' property.
• Type properties not available (in Project Parameters, or anywhere else)
• Users nominate Start point and End point - it does not allow us to nominate any intermediate points that we want to go through.  
• Perhaps Autodesk could create a way to link paths to allow this?
• It is not possible to move either the start or end point individually - it seems like you have to recreate a new one if you get it wrong first time. 
• What happens if you don't like the route that algorithm has chosen as the shortest route?  You may have good reasons for not wanting that route.  I would like to have the ability to either choose another option (Like Google Maps directions), or else to be able to nominate intermediate points, or even to be able to drag individual joint nodes between each segment.

More On Path of Travel

• Follow Up Detail on Path Analysis .

Improvements to Path of Travel in point releases:

•   Enhancements in Revit 2020.1 - Move Start/End Points 
•  Reveal Obstacles - New Feature in 2020.1
• Revit 2020.2 Add Waypoints  

8 comments:

Very good write up, Tim (as always). Cheers, Jan

Odd that Revit paths/routing cant handle stairs/ramps when the Live render walk feature can in the same geometry

We look forward to route analysis including up and down stairs. The Daleks solved the problem. See https://youtu.be/3_cJ9BlMCw8

Did you create your own tag? Because the "path of travel lines" family is its own category, it won't accept a generic detail component tag, and there isn't a path of travel tag--which is specifically what Revit requires.

Autodesk do provide a 'Path of Travel' annotation tag in their library when you install Revit 2020. If you can't find that, just create a new tag family (Generic Annotation), then change its category to Path of Travel (only avialable from 2020 onwards).

Could it works on different levels? otherwise, in my opinion, it is a ridiculous tool.

What about a Tag for this element? I want to label the line length and there is no default or way to extract the line length value!

Hi Emodderman. There is a tag that displays the line length (see the section on tagging above). Or do you mean something else?

Add or Remove Waypoints from a Path of Travel

Use waypoints on a path of travel to adjust the route between the start and end points. Waypoints are added to an existing Path of Travel line.

Add a Waypoint

• Select a Path of Travel line.

• Click on the Path of Travel line to place the waypoint.
• Click and drag a waypoint node to reposition it.

Remove a Waypoint

• Select the waypoint node to remove it.

Related Concepts

• About Path of Travel
• Path of Travel Instance Properties
• People Flow Toolkit

Related Tasks

• Place a Path of Travel
• Reveal Obstacles
• Video: Place a Path of Travel
• Update a Path of Travel
• Video: Path of Travel Waypoints

Related Reference

• Route Analysis Settings
• Path of Travel Calculations

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5765 N.W.158th Street, Miami Lakes, FL 33014

• Autodesk Blog
• Path of Travel in Revit

James Cuervo

Manually calculating the walking distance between rooms can be time-consuming. We can use the “Path of Travel” function to calculate the shortest route between rooms.

Walls, openings, and other objects are taken into account and shown with the “Reveal Obstacles” function. We can even change which object categories are considered obstacles and which ones are ignored, such as doors. Once complete, the Path of Travel’s data can be put onto a schedule.

The sophisticated Path of Travel command can give us valuable information in Revit. For more information, please contact us at [email protected]

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Path of Travel Instance Properties

Modify instance properties to change the line style and mark value on a path of travel.

To change instance properties , select the element and change its properties on the Properties palette.

Related Concepts

• About Path of Travel
• People Flow Toolkit
• About Tag Labels

Related Tasks

• Place a Path of Travel
• Reveal Obstacles
• Video: Place a Path of Travel
• Update a Path of Travel
• Add or Remove Waypoints from a Path of Travel
• Video: Path of Travel Waypoints
• Create a Schedule or Quantity

Related Reference

• Route Analysis Settings
• Path of Travel Calculations

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