Area Plans: Creating a simple Area Plan

Area Plans: Creating a simple Area Plan

In this short tutorial we are going to create a simple Area Plan in order to determine the “gross internal floor area” for certain zones of our building.

The building I am going to use for this tutorial is a sports & leisure complex. The floor plan looks like this…

Now this building consists of 3 distinct zones:-

1) Sports Hall and associated changing rooms

2) Fitness Suite and associated changing rooms

3) Community facilites (including café and dance studio)

What I would like to be able to do is to quickly determine the gross internal floor area for each of the 3 zones named above. In order to do this I am going to use Revit’s “Area Plan” function.

So let’s start by creating an Area Plan for Zone 1. The Area Plan tool can be found under the “Room and Area” Design bar….

Go ahead and select “Area Plan”. Upon selecting this you will be presented with the “New Area Plan” control panel. Before you do anything else, change the Type to “Gross Building” (it comes up by default as “Rentable”)…

Now all you have to do is choose which Level you wish to base your new Area Plan on. Pick an appropriate Level and select it. Revit will then create a basic Area Plan and add it under the appropriate section in the Project Browser…

If I double click on the name of this Area Plan- and I am taken to it in the main window. Note: The fact that the plan is orientated diagonally is due to how I set up by building originally and is nothing to do with the Area Plan function.

You will notice that Revit has placed some purple lines on top of my plan. This is the current boundary of the area plan. You can think of “Areas” and “Area Plans” in the same manner as “Rooms” and “Room Bounding elements”. Quite simple you define a boundary for the area you wish to measure- by use of the “Area Boundary” tool and then add an “Area” element to the bounded area (just as you would add a “Room” element to a space that was bounded by room-boundary elements).

What I’m going to do now is add an “Area” to the space bounded by the “Area Boundary”. I first select “Area” from the Design Bar…

…and then hover my cursor over the space enclosed by the purple boundary lines. If the purple lines form a valid boundary (ie they form a closed loop) you will see an “area extents cross-hair” appear- this is the same type of symbol that appears when you are about to place a “room object” onto a plan.

I go ahead and click to place the Area “object”. The bounded area is immediately shown as a shaded region…..

Now just as you would add a Room Tag to a “Room” in order to display useful info (area, etc); you need to add an Area Tag to your newly formed Area. Do this with the Area Tag tool…

Once selected you just hover over the Area with your cursor and click to place the Tag. Keep in mind that the Tag may appear very small depending on what scale you have set for your Area Plan.

So far so good! But what if you want to modify the boundary? This is easy- the boundary lines behave just like any other Revit lines in so much as you can move them, erase them and draw new ones.

In the image above, I’ve zoomed in on part of my Area Boundary. I’ve selected one of the boundary lines. Now I can just drag it to a new location…

I have tidied up the lines using the standard Trim / Extend tools. The important thing to note here is that the final boundary must be a neat, closed loop. If you need to draw additional segments of boundary, just select the Area Boundary tool….

Upon selecting the Area Boundary tool you are presented with two methods of placing boundary lines. The default is to just click on a wall and let Revit add a boundary line along it’s centre line….

An added advantage with this method is that the boundary lines retain a relationship with the walls that they are based upon. For example, if you subsequently move a wall in your design, the boundary that makes up the area plan should adjust accordingly.

The second method is to simply draw new boundary lines using the Draw tool. To do this first switch to the Draw command on the Option Bar (you need to still be in the Area Boundary mode, in order to do this)….

You will notice that you have all the normal “drawing” options available to you on the Options Bar (Line, shape, offset, radius, etc).

This tutorial has been a simple, overview of the Area Plan function within Revit. Hopefully you will have seen how they can be used to easily determine the numerical value of large areas of your design.

from: http://www.revitzone.com