Fire Rating

Fire Rating consolidates the three things teams actually do with fire ratings - finding gaps, color-coding the model, and correcting wrong values - into one modeless window. It runs against walls, doors, floors, and ceilings together, so a single pass covers a typical permit-set fire-protection review.

When to use it

• Pre-permit QA/QC: Catch unrated walls, mismatched door ratings, and unrated elements adjacent to rated walls before the architect-of-record stamps the set.
• Coordination with consultants: Hand off a colored plan view that makes ratings legible at a glance.
• Fix-up after type swaps: When a door type is swapped or a fire-barrier wall is added late, batch-correct the downstream door ratings instead of editing each instance.

Opening the window

Click Modeling -> Fire Rating (shortcut HF). The window is modeless - leave it open while you navigate the model, place elements, or run other tools. Selections in the issues grid and Revit selection both stay in sync.

The window has three tabs: Audit, Visualize, Fix. The Fix tab is gated to the professional license tier; in base mode the Fix buttons are disabled with a tooltip explaining the upgrade path.

Audit tab

1. Tick the categories to scan (Walls, Doors, Floors, Ceilings). Walls + Doors are on by default - that combination covers the most common compliance findings.
2. Click Run Audit. The scan runs three checks against one shared element snapshot:
   • Missing fire rating (WARNING) - any element of the chosen categories with no value or an empty Fire Rating parameter.
   • Door-wall mismatch (ERROR) - the door's type-level fire rating does not match its host wall's rating. Doors with no host wall are skipped (these are typically schedules / placeholder instances).
   • Adjacent unrated (WARNING) - an unrated wall, floor, or ceiling whose bounding box sits within ~1 ft of a rated wall. Useful for catching missed continuity at fire-barrier intersections.
3. Click any row in the Issues grid - the element is selected and zoomed to in Revit's active view. Use this to walk the issues and decide which ones need a fix vs. a model correction.
4. Click Export CSV to save a compliance report. The export uses the standard Pyvoid audit-framework columns (Element ID, Element Type, Element Name, Issue Type, Severity, Description, Suggested Fix) so it drops into existing QA/QC workflows.

Tip: The audit reads from a shared parameter named Fire Rating (or the built-in WALL_FIRE_RATING / DOOR_FIRE_RATING parameters when bound). If your office uses a different name, add it to the project's Fire Rating shared parameter binding rather than renaming - the visualizer relies on the shared parameter ID for multi-category view filters.

Visualize tab

1. Choose Active View Only (default) or pick a set of named plan views.
2. Tick Include cut patterns if you want the rating color to show in section / RCP cut elements as well as projection.
3. Tick Halftone unrated elements to push unrated walls / floors / ceilings to the background.
4. Click Apply Filters. One ParameterFilterElement is created per unique rating value found in the model - all four categories are covered in a single filter, so a single click colors walls, doors, floors, and ceilings consistently.

The color ramp is the fire-protection industry convention:

Non-standard values (e.g. 90 Min) get assigned a color from a fallback gradient so they still appear distinctly.

Click Create Legend to drop a sheet-ready legend view named FRT Legend containing one colored swatch + label per rating. Drag it onto a coversheet for permit submission.

Click Clear Filters to remove all FRT - filters from the active view (other view filters are untouched - the prefix scopes the cleanup).

Fix tab (Professional)

The Fix tab handles type-level door rating corrections and selection-based batch assigns. Both operations run inside a single Revit transaction, support Ctrl+Z, and record a FixBatch in the in-tool history for forward-undo workflows.

Scan & fix mismatches

1. Click Scan Mismatches. The tool collects every door whose type-rating does not match its host wall's rating, then groups the fixes by door type - one row per type, not per door.
2. The preview grid shows each affected type, its current rating, the proposed rating (matched to the most common host-wall rating among that type's instances), and the affected instance count. Read this column carefully - changing a door type's rating affects every instance of that type in the model.
3. Click Apply Fixes. The confirmation dialog repeats the per-type counts so you can back out before committing.
4. After commit, the Fix history records the batch under the tool name "Fire Rating" - undo from the global Pyvoid undo history (or Ctrl+Z in Revit) reverses the type-rating writes.

Batch assign by selection

1. Select walls, doors, floors, or ceilings in Revit (any combination - the tool reads the live selection).
2. Click Refresh Selection in the Fix tab to pull the count.
3. Pick the target rating from the dropdown.
4. Click Apply to Selection - all selected elements get the chosen rating in one transaction. Doors are written at the type level (matching how Revit stores DOOR_FIRE_RATING); walls / floors / ceilings are written at the instance level.

Critical: Door ratings are a type parameter in Revit. Setting one door instance's rating changes every door of that type. The tool always operates at the type level for doors and shows the affected instance count up front - but if you need divergent ratings across instances of the same type, duplicate the type first.

Compatibility notes

• Revit 2027: The WALL_FIRE_RATING built-in parameter was removed. The collector falls back to LookupParameter('Fire Rating') automatically. As long as the project has a shared Fire Rating parameter bound to walls, the audit and visualizer work identically across Revit 2024-2027.
• View templates: If the active view is governed by a view template that locks graphic overrides, the visualizer skips it with a log warning. Either temporarily detach the template or apply filters via the multi-view picker (which can write to a copy of the template).

Troubleshooting

Related tools

• Color Splasher - generic visualization for any parameter; use for non-fire compliance views.
• View Template Conformer - re-apply a corrected template across many views after Fire Rating's filters have been added.

Last updated: 2026-04-16