Revit Views for Fire Rating Review

A very important aspect of designing and reviewing a building project is the code review process to ensure that walls, doors, windows, and other components have the proper fire ratings.  Autodesk Revit makes it very easy to quickly visually check those fire ratings by setting up visibility filters.  This article will show you how to set up a fire rating view to display walls and doors as different colors depending on the fire rating parameter of the object.  This view is not necessarily designed to be a full code plan for permit submittals, but is an excellent asset for in-house code reviews.

Step 1:  Create Filters for the various fire ratings

• On the View tab, go to the Graphics panel and select the Filters button.
• When the Filters dialog box opens, select the New button icon at the bottom left portion of the dialog box.
• In the Filter Name dialog box, type in a descriptive name for the filter as you may end up with many filters within a project.  (I like to preface the name with the purpose of the filter to group similar filters.)  For this example, type in Fire Rating – Wall – 1 Hr and pick the OK button.
• In the Categories area of the Filters dialog box, scroll down and place a checkmark next to the Walls category.
• Under Filter Rules section, select the Fire Rating parameter, the equals qualifier, and then type “1 Hr”.
  • It is extremely important that the “1 Hr” value that is entered is EXACTLY the same as the parameter value that is entered for the object’s instance or type value.  If this value does not match EXACTLY (including case), then the filter will not work.  Standards need to be in place in your organization to ensure that consistency exists for parameters.

• Repeat the above New filter steps for an addition wall filter, but change the Filter Rules value to be “2 Hr”:
  • Fire Rating – Wall – 2 Hr
• Repeat the above New filter steps for the following Filters, but use the Door category and using the appropriate value for the Filter Rules:
  • Fire Rating – Door – 90 Min
  • Fire Rating – Door – 60 Min
  • Fire Rating – Door – 45 Min
  • Fire Rating – Door – 20 Min
• After creating the various desired filters, pick the OK button to exit the Filters dialog box.  These filters will now be available in any view in your project.

Step 2:  Create a Floor Plan specifically for fire ratings review

• In the Project Browser, right-click on an existing floor plan which is similar to the desired fire ratings review plan.
• From the context-sensitive menu, select Duplicate View -> Duplicate.
• Right-click on the newly created view in the Project Browser and rename the view accordingly.  For example purposes here, we will name the view “2^nd Floor Fire Ratings Review Plan”.
• I find it helpful to have the room names visible on the plan to ensure that I have proper fire ratings around special rooms, such as mechanical rooms.  To add room tags to all of the rooms in the view at once, go to the Home tab -> Room & Area panel -> Tag All Not Tagged option and then choose the desired Room Tag from the dialog box.
• Create additional fire ratings review plans as necessary.

Step 3:  Apply Filters to the view

• Open the 2^nd Floor Fire Ratings Review Plan view.
• Type VV or VG to enter the Visibility Graphics dialog box for the view.
• Go to the Filters tab of the Visibility Graphics dialog box and pick the Add button.
• In the Add Filters dialog box, select all of the Fire Rating filters and pick the OK button to add them to the view.
• Back in the Filters tab, make sure that the Visibility box is checked adjacent to each one of the filters.  These will be checkmarked by default.
• Pick the Lines option under Projection/Surface for the Fire Rating – Wall – 1 Hr filter.
  • When the Line Graphics dialog box appears, pick the button to the right of Color and change the color to Red instead of No Override.  Pick the OK button.
• Pick the Lines option under Cut for the Fire Rating – Wall – 1 Hr filter.
  • When the Line Graphics dialog box appears, pick the button to the right of Color and change the color to Red instead of no Override.  Pick the OK button.
• Repeat the last 2 steps for each of the Fire Rating filters, but use different colors for each rating to make it easy to differentiate the various ratings.
• Pick the OK button to apply the filters and exit the dialog box.

 

The following illustration shows 1 Hr rated walls in red, 60 Min doors in red, 20 Min doors in blue, and unrated walls and doors in default black.

 

Creating these filters do not make the project code-compliant!  These fire ratings views only help the code reviewer visually check the information based upon the Fire Rating parameters in the families.

The above instructions are for Revit Architecture 2011, but are similar for earlier versions.  They can also be utilized with Revit MEP and Revit Structure if desired.

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