Explore the complexities of setting up an area plan, from customizing schemes to adjusting color options. Learn the nuances of calculations, such as area and volume computations, and delve into the possibilities of creating custom area plans for specific requirements like plumbing fixture calculations.
Key Insights
- Area plans in Autodesk are customizable and allow for the creation of unique area and volume computation schemes, which are essential in setting up building plans. These schemes can help in specific calculations like determining the minimum number of plumbing fixtures.
- Creating unique names for the areas in your computation scheme can provide a workaround when it isn't possible to add new input values. Changing the sort order, for example, sorting by name rather than area type, can reveal additional options for customization.
- Awareness of system limitations is essential to avoid wasting time and effort. For instance, changing scheme types can reset color configurations, making it advisable to finalize colors after establishing the system you're using.
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Before we dive into the rentable area, I just wanted to run through a few options that are available to us from our area and color schemes that we have the different options for. So right now, you know, our area plan is kind of set up to where we have our gross building area and we have our rentable area, which we haven't created the rentable ones yet, so it hasn't shown up here. Because these are system plans, they're pretty locked into the type of things that we can have here.
And when I look at this, you know, it's, it's just set up pretty straightforward from Autodesk, it doesn't give us a lot of options here, but we do have ways that we can go through and make our own custom schemes if we wanted to. If we wanted to customize this a little bit from our architecture tab, if I click on this down arrow here, it'll give me a couple options. If I go to area and volume computations, from here we have the way that it's going to computate.
So right now it's just going to calculate our, our areas only, because we don't need it to calculate volume for us. And then it's giving me the definition of how it's going to calculate the room areas. And we'll be taking a look at that here in a little bit when we get into the, the tenant layout.
But the area schemes can be modified. So right now we've just got gross area and we have rentable area. But there's different things that you may use.
So let's say you're trying to do plumbing fixture calculations, for instance. That gives you a little bit more latitude on areas that don't necessarily have to be calculated for that measurement. And so you could create a new one here and you can give it a name and a description.
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If you said, you know, plumbing fixture calc, then you can say the area that we use, you know, per your building code. So area per for us, it would be CBC or CPC calculation. And so I could use that as the scheme to create new area plans.
And so it's the same process. If I went in to area and then area plan, I could say, okay, well now I would like to calculate what my minimum number of plumbing fixtures is allowed. And so we could jump in and create those views for the same thing.
And it's, it's basing it upon a gross area scheme. So I'd just say no here. But it does give me now when I have my area plans, you can see I've got area plans, plumbing fixture calcs, and then I could go through and using the area boundary lines, I could go through and define the different areas that I'm using to calculate the plumbing fixtures.
So whether it's a different load factor for a specific area, or if it's a different designation that you have that you wanted to be able to break it out into certain ways and have multiple different options. And so this isn't necessarily something that we're doing for this course and this, this lesson. But I felt compelled as I was going through this to show you that those options are there because it can be very frustrating, especially when you're trying to come up with something or do something that doesn't exist right out of the box from Revit.
And so the other thing I wanted to go through was just the color schemes. You have the different options. We've got our gross building, our plumbing fixture calc, and like all of these different options that are available right out of the box.
But if you wanted to, you can create different schemes, you can rename them, and you can create new ones by duplicating existing ones that are available to you. One of the most frustrating things that I've run into is this plus arrow here. It gives you the illusion that you'll be able to add different values that can be assigned here, and that's not necessarily the case depending on which of the selections that you've chosen.
If we were on area type, which is just assigning a type to our area, which is something that we'll be taking a look at later, I can't necessarily add new input values here. But the way you can get around that is by using unique names for the area that's being used to run this calculation. Or you can define your area types in different ways, and that'll give you the ability to do it.
So like if I go in here, this is going to sort by area type, but if I were to change it by name, you can see that it now has the gross building area, level one, and level two, because we gave different names to those different objects there. And so if I were to stick with this here, and you can see we've got these three different options. When I go to my sheet, which is the A001 that we created, the legend now is showing both our level one gross area and level two gross area differently.
And that's because I don't have the legend on level one. And so that's one way that you can modify this is you can go in and you can change it based upon the different scheme types. And so if I were to go to area type, it's going to pop back to this.
It's also important to note that I've lost the color that I customized, because every time I make this type of change here, it's going to reassign the colors to something different. So there's little things here like that may not be that big of a deal to have to go back in and kind of find that color that you were using before. I have no idea which one it was.
It was something kind of along these lines. But something to keep in mind, you know, you want to finalize your colors prior to or after you've kind of established the system that you're using. Because if you don't, then you're going to be doing what I'm doing here and trying to find the color that you had previously.
And it just adds more time to your process and nobody likes that, right? So just something to keep in mind, a couple of tips that you could use if you found yourself in a situation where you needed to add different types of area schemes.
