Explore the process of creating rentable area plans in Revit, including setting up boundaries, defining different spaces, and customizing your color scheme. Learn how to use critical tools and features in Revit to create a more accurate, visually engaging representation of a building's rentable spaces.
Key Insights
- Creating rentable area plans in Revit involves several important steps: selecting the rentable area, creating your own boundary which differs from the one automatically created by Revit, and handling the boundary lines to outline the building's structure and different spaces.
- Revit allows you to define different spaces within your building, such as common areas, tenant spaces, and vertical circulation areas. It's essential to accurately draw boundaries and set them correctly to get a precise depiction of different areas.
- Customizing color schemes in Revit enhances the visual representation of your building plan. Different colors can represent different types of areas, making it easier to differentiate spaces at a glance.
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Now we can go ahead and go through a similar process, but instead of using the gross area plan that we did before, we're going to go ahead and do rentable area. And so I'm going to pick the rentable area, pick level 1 and level 2, and hit OK. This time we're definitely going to say no to this because we're going to create our own boundary, so it's going to be very different from what Revit would create for us, and would just create a ton of work if we had to go back in and recreate these boundary lines.
So I'm going to say no, I'm going to say no again, and now we've got our plans here. If we scroll over to our project browser, you can see we've got our area rentable, level 1 and level 2. I'm going to start with level 1, and we're going to go through a really similar process to what we did for the gross area plan. So the first thing I'll do is I'm going to turn on my crop region and set that scope box to scope box 1, because it's the same one we're dealing with, and then I'm just going to get rid of the things that I don't need to see.
So I'll go ahead and hide and view by category both grid lines and section tags, and if you have any elevations or anything that's showing up in here, you can do the same thing with that stuff as well. And then now we're ready to start drawing our boundary lines. We can start by creating the boundary around the outside of the building, and then we'll pop back in and create the different spaces that we have, like our stair elevator, and then the lobby, you know, separating it differently from the rest of the space.
So I'm going to go in and start by grabbing that area boundary line, and by default it always sets it to pick lines, but I find it's easier to work with it as a draw lines tool. And so we'll go ahead and just trace all the way around the outside of the building, and I'm just being careful to make sure I hit those end points. You can see I'm using zooming in, zooming out, just to make sure I'm hitting the accurate point here, because if you have to go back and make the adjustment, it's just a little bit more work for To match our gross area, I'm just going to go ahead and make sure I hit this glass line, but you can see like the difference between when we did the automatic versus what we're doing now.
It's a little bit more accurate because it's starting to grab some of these spaces that would ordinarily count, whereas the automatic one went through and it just kind of blew through the system and created those different boundaries. So that's our exterior boundary. Now I'm going to go ahead and isolate our stairs.
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I'm doing the same thing, I'm just going to grab the draw lines to make sure I can get the right spaces here, and then do the same thing. We've got a boundary line around our elevator, and I'll just take a rectangle like that, and then I can do the same thing with the stair. If I use the rectangle tool though, I'm going to go ahead and accidentally double up some lines, and it's even hard to kind of find a point over here.
So what you could do is you could draw the rectangle like I've done here, and then delete that line, and then just connect the ends. I'm not sure if it's more or less work than just drawing the lines around, but whatever works for you guys. That's not something that's going to be critical, the workflow there.
And then I'll go ahead and draw a boundary around what our lobby would be. So same thing, using the boundary line, and just picking it from one of these end points here, and then just going around. I'm going to take it all the way up to the face of these columns here, because we are going to add some more walls to better describe the core of this building.
And then just closing off these areas using the trim tool. And you saw I got a warning as I was doing this, because I do have two different lines here. So like I mentioned in one of the earlier videos, if I go in and just draw a and hit delete, I'm actually going to be deleting that wall as well.
When I select an item like this area boundary line, I want to make sure that's the only thing I have selected. And the two easy ways to do that, you can see that it's calling it out in the properties, and see that little one there? That's telling me I only have one thing selected. You can also look down in the bottom right of your screen, it shows on the filter that there's only one thing selected.
And so I that's all that I have picked. And so now I've got my area boundaries drawn correctly for me to start defining the different areas that that we're working with. And this is just pretty much for the core to define it if it was just one tenant.
If I wanted to define this as two different tenant spaces, then I can draw another area boundary line. And I'll just pick, say the midpoint here. So it's like one tenants on this side, and then another tenant would be on that side.
And so I'll go ahead and just grab that midpoint and then take it straight up to the to the other boundary line up here. And so you can see we've got two distinct spaces for lease area, and then we've got these different common areas that we could use. So the next step is going to be to start defining our different spaces.
And so if I go to area here to place areas, we have different area types that we can be placing here. And so you can see that if I go in and and draw it, it's going to be by default the building common areas, the first one, but I could change it to the different options that we have here. So I'm going to start with the building common area, which is going to be this lobby space that we have.
And so I can place that area. And then I can give it the name that I actually want it to be, which is going to be lobby. And then I can do another area.
And this one I can change instead of building common area, I could use office area, which would define it as a tenant space. We have a couple of those. And then I can go in and I can call this one tenant one.
And then I'll call this one tenant two. And as you go through and do this, you might see your numbers vary a little bit from from what I have. And you know, there could be a lot of different factors that that could drive that.
If you just if you missed one of these points, just very slightly, or if you have it on the inside or the outside face of the wall, you're going to get different areas, but I wouldn't get too hung up on that because it's more about the concept of drawing the boundary and getting it set set that way instead. So the next ones I'm going to do here are going to be for our vertical circulation. And so I'll go ahead and pick the area again.
And I'll just change the type area type here to major vertical penetration here. And I'm going to pick by three different vertical areas, which are my stairs and my elevators. And then I'll go back in and rename them.
So stair, elevator, and then the other ones stairs as well. And then now I can set the color scheme for this view. So I can go in and just like we did before, I can say that our color scheme for this one, we're going to go ahead and set that to rentable area.
And you can see it's going by area type. If it goes by these four different area types, then it's going to go ahead and define them differently. So I can say okay to that.
And again, remember the colors are by default. And so what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to change the tenant too, because that's going to remain shell space. I'm going to change that one to just floor area so that we can see the difference between the two in this graphic.
Now when you look at it, and these colors are, they're not that great. They're actually really hard for me on this screen to kind of differentiate between the major vertical penetration and the floor area. So I think this deserves a little bit of tweaking.
And so I'm going to go ahead and jump into our color scheme and edit these colors. And remember, if I were to change this to say like name, it's going to keep changing the colors. We want to make sure that we're good with using area type, and then we're going to go through and make our modifications.
And so for building common area, we can kind of use like a greenish color, which that looks pretty good. For floor area, it's going to be kind of close to the blue that we use for our gross building area. Sort of creating these in a vacuum as well, so I'm not necessarily seeing how they look against the other ones until we do, which is always fun, right? Actually go into like a darker hue down here.
And then for the major vertical penetration areas, I'm going to use like a darker gray tone. Actually, I'll use like a lighter one. And you're definitely allowed to change your mind as you go through this too.
And then for the office area, which will be our tenant space, it'll be a little different than our floor area, but it should be along kind of the same lines. And again, very subjective. You can do these however you want.
So here's my color schemes, and I'll go ahead and hit okay. And this one looks a little too dark for me, so I'm going to go ahead and modify that. Keeping in mind, I don't want it to look exactly like the the shell space that we've defined here.
So I can go ahead and maybe lighten that one a little bit. And then hit okay. And not bad.
It probably changed this a little bit, but again, it's totally up to you, and you can go ahead and make these revisions however you see fit. The next thing that we could do here is we could make the same changes to, say, the boundary lines that we had done before, and also adjusting that color scheme location from either front to back, and then repeating those processes on level two. So I'm going to go ahead and make it into the foreground so we're consistent between both of our plans, and then we'll go ahead and jump in in the next video to level two.
