Developing Gross and Rentable Area Plans for Interior Layout Design: Level 1 and Level 2 Area Plans

For these next couple of lessons here, we're going to go ahead and shift gears, and for this one, we're going to focus on developing our different Area Plans. So that's going to include our Gross Area Plan and our Rentable Area Plan, and this is pretty similar to what we did in BIM 201, but we're going to add a few more tips and tricks and also elevate it to the next level because we are going to be developing an interior layout for one of the suites that we're going to be designating. So the first thing we're going to do, just to kind of get us back into the swing of things of doing Area Plans, is we're going to create our Gross Area Plans for both Level 1 and Level 2.

So to do that, the first thing I want to do is go to my Architecture tab, click on Area, and then Area Plan. I want to create one for both Level 1 and Level 2, and like I said before, this is going to be our Gross Building Area Plans, and this will be a sheet that we're going to be putting in our set as well. So I'm going to go ahead and start with creating both of these Area Plans. I'm going to hit OK. We've discussed this before, but you can have it automatically create those area boundary lines associated with the exterior walls. While this might work and could do a good job, a lot of times it does create a lot of rework. But for the purposes of this class and for educational purposes, I'm going to go against every fiber of my being and click Yes here—and do it again for Level 2. When we look at it, it's something you just need to evaluate. When I go through and look here, it's pretty tame for exterior plans—especially a simple layout like ours—and it looks pretty good. I think we could probably make that one work.

When we look at the Area Plan for Level 1—since that was Level 2—we can see that that one's pretty good as well. There are little bits here that are not necessarily correct, because you can see this entire wall is on the interior face instead of the exterior face there. These ones here look pretty good as well, so we got lucky there. I think the big difference here on Level 2 is we're double-counting this giant space here, which is wide open. That wouldn't necessarily count as Gross Area, and it certainly doesn't exclude any areas that you might be able to exclude based upon your jurisdiction's definition of area. So that's really the big thing—you can see it's going clearly to the drip line, which is fine here, but you just want to make sure if you do allow the software to generate the boundary lines for you, it can't just be a click and go. It's got to be something like we just did—re-evaluating it.

We'll go ahead and fix one of these areas here, and that's going to be this first area boundary line. When I hit Delete on that, it's going to give me an error because that area is no longer enclosed. But that's okay because we can go back in and draw in that boundary line. I'm just going to go through here and eliminate a portion of it, so I'm just going to take it across and through the stair here and reconnect it back at this point. I'll do the same thing on this side, where I'm just drawing those boundary lines and reconnecting it back at the front here. You can see it got a little squirrely with that—I'm going to go ahead and just trim those boundary lines together. One of the things that we want to make sure of as we're doing this is ensuring that we still have the ability to modify our model elements. When you're doing something like trim or selecting something and hitting Delete, you have to be very careful because the last thing you want to do is mess up your model while you're creating your Area Plan.

Now I've got my area set for Level 2. Let me make sure it's picking the whole thing—and that looks pretty good. It's saying it's 19,826 feet, and I'm actually on what looks like the Room here and not the Area. So there's the Area here—19,825.51—so round it up to 826 square feet. I'm just going to rename this one to be Level 2 Gross Area. Because this will be a view that we put on the sheet, we'll go through that process of turning on the crop region and then bringing it down to just be part of the portion of the sheet that we want. Then we can hop over to Level 1 and do the same thing. I just want to grab that area tag and move it out of the restroom so you can actually see what's going on here, and then I'll call this one Level 1 Gross Area.

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Even though we did a quick sweep, I just want to double-check again and make sure that this is good. It looks like it's going to the glass line, which is fine. It's not going to make a huge difference in our area, but if you were using a different area calculation method, you could make adjustments to that one. Everything looks good here. You can see it's a little smaller because we have that big overhang on Level 2 and then this giant space that's not part of Level 1. We'll do the same thing with the view here to get that set up—just pulling in that crop region, making sure everything's going to look the way we want. And there we go—we've got Level 1 and Level 2 Gross Area Plans set up and ready to go. The next thing we'll need to do is establish that view template that we're going to want to have for these views, and then we'll put them on a sheet.