Revit Tip: Make Planting and Site Components location aware using Dynamo scripting

by Dennis Collin

Recently whilst conducting a Revit training course for Landscape Architects, I was asked a question whether Revit plant families could automatically show their location relating to a planter bed. For many categories like furniture or MEP equipment this field is available out of the box and can be added to a standard equipment schedule. However, for Site and Planting components this option is not available. But there is an answer, by using Dynamo, Revit’s visual scripting environment we can achieve this!

Fig. Whilst the location field could be manually entered, it would be better if the process was automated!

The standard Dynamo nodes can achieve many tasks, but to get the room information it is easier to use a custom node, install the appropriate Rhythm package for the version of Revit. The script is simple and once run, provides the required information for the schedule. For the purposes of this example a location project parameter was created and then assigned to the site and planting categories. This parameter will then be populated by the combined Room name and number fields processed by the script.

Fig. Sample script making using of Rhythum node. The amber node indicates no site components were found within the project.

The schedule view is updated and the results seen in the image below:

The information can then be further sorted by planter reference, species etc. as required.