Create a camera view by room

By WOJCIECH KLEPACKI wklepa@gmail.com
During the coordination process in Navisworks, having a camera placed in every room would
be one of the most welcome features. Creating the camera in Navisworks or Revit it’s an easy but
tedious process and can take several hours to complete. There is always a good chance to miss one
of the critical room. The good news is that it’s fairly easy to automate in Revit and Dynamo.
In the beginning, I did a couple of initial statements. The first one is that I’m interested in
collecting all but redundant rooms. The second is that I want to place the camera in the room reference
point. I would be very reluctant to place the camera in the geometrical centre of the room because it
can be located next to the wall or another obstacle. The last statement is that I want to take the most
distant point of the room. This distance is calculated from the reference point. Seemingly, the whole
workflow looks simply and indeed, it’s not complicated.
Om the series of drawings below, I’m presenting what kind of outcome I’m looking for. This is
an example of the camera located according to the rules I described at the beginning.

The image below shows the perspective view of the situation from the plan shown above.

I’m composing my scripts in Dynamo using the Design Script Language. It’s based on
the Code Blocks enriched with classic nodes in places when I either used the custom or third‐party
nodes or when I decided to leave them for code clarity. This technique has some advantages over the

classic method. It’s a matter of a good practice to plug watch nodes to monitor the outcome in the
critical locations.
On the snippet below, I’m showing the overall look of the script. The script is divided into the
logical parts, doing roughly serious of connected tasks, thereabouts.

At the beginning of the process, I’m starting to collect all the rooms in a project. The code
below does it exactly in a beautifully simple yet effective way:

Now, it comes the time to clear all the redundant room, extract some room associated
parameter values I will need later in a workflow. I’m interested in knowing are there any rooms in a
model that not meeting the condition. Typing the condition, I mean not closed or redundant. This is
simple operation realised by FilterByBoolMask function. Rooms in a scope are on a sublist with index
0 of the main list. The redundant rooms are on sublist with index 1. Therefore, it’s easy to pull them
from the recess.

I’m always interested what impact my scripting decisions may have on the process. This is the
reason I’m using the Watch node in critical places to examine the results. Take a moment to look at
the image below.

As I mentioned, it’s very convenient to know what rooms don’t meet the criteria.
Now, comes the time to do the serious task. I decided to put most of the script into one Code
Block. There is a good reason for this. When you read my explanation, you will find out that all the
processes in the block are acting together. Every next operation is a direct and logical consequence of
the operation(s) performed before. Writing the script this way gives an opportunity to keep the code
clear and as compact as possible.
The block basically takes three inputs: rooms, room numbers and room names. Subsequently,
it extracts the room boundaries and, this is an important step, takes only the exterior lines in the
count. I’m doing this using GetItemAtIndex function applied on the third level of the list (@‐3<1>
method). Afterwards, I’m pulling the start points from the listed curves and extracting room reference
locations. The next point is a compulsory step because the node which creates the camera views needs
bounding boxes to work correctly. I’m extracting the cardinal points from room coordinates.
Therefore, it’s absolutely necessary to have room limits set correctly. There is a nice script in my
collection doing this, but this is a story to tell on another occasion. Going back to the topic, have to
connect room location point with all room corners to calculate the most distant point. I have to
perform this operation for every single room and I have to do it well. Luckily, the Dynamo does it in a
simple way using the robust MaximumItem function. Please, pay attention that MaximumItem
function returns vector lengths. Meanwhile, I want to have a list of points finally. Now it’s a matter of
a good workflow to compare the lists to extract only the points I mentioned in the sentence before.
Once the problem is sorted I can calculate the camera eye and target position. This is a trivial
operation, the only trick is, I’m adding 1800mm to the Z coordinate value for both eye and target
position. In case you are not happy with this value you are free to experiment once you complete your
own script. At the end of the block, I’m remapping some values and combining room numbers with
room names into one value. This is only because I want to identify the camera views somehow in a
Revit project browser. The camera names will popup same manner in Navisworks once the model is
exported.


Now comes the time to let the formal job. The sequence of nodes shown below sets and crops
the views in Revit.

I believe in data analysing; therefore, I want my critical data to be exported to Excel
spreadsheet to examine them later.


The image below shows the exemplary results of the exporting process.

This concludes the lesson or speaking less formally, that’s all folks.

Create a camera view by room

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Create a camera view by room