Discover how to develop gross and rentable area plans using advanced BIM techniques and tools. Learn how to create area plans for different levels, automatically generate area boundary lines, evaluate and modify these lines, and establish view templates for your plans.
Key Insights
- The article provides an in-depth walkthrough of creating gross area plans for different levels in a building model using BIM tools, including establishing the area boundary lines and adjusting them as needed.
- It emphasizes the importance of carefully evaluating automatically generated area boundary lines, as these may need adjustments or corrections to accurately represent the building's gross area. The article demonstrates how to make these modifications and warnings to avoid disrupting the model while doing so.
- Finally, the article details how to rename and prepare these area plans for presentation on a sheet, including adjusting the crop region and setting up view templates.
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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 one and level two.
So to do that the first thing I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and go to my architecture tab click on area and then area plan and I want to create one for both level one and level two 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. So I'm going to hit okay and we've discussed this before but you can have it automatically create those area boundary lines associated with the exterior walls and while this might work and it could do a good job a lot of times it does create a lot of rework but for the 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 two and when we look at it's something you just need to evaluate and so when I go through and look here it's pretty tame for exterior plans because especially a simple layout like ours and it looks pretty good and I think we could probably make that one work when we look at the area plan for level two for level one since that was level two we can see that that one's pretty good as well there's like 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 and then these ones here look pretty good as well so we got lucky there I think the big difference here on level two is we're double counting this giant space here which is wide open so that wouldn't necessarily count as a gross area and it certainly doesn't exclude any areas that you know might 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 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 that we just did and re-evaluating it and so we'll go ahead and fix one of these guys here and that's going to be this first area boundary line and 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 we can draw in that boundary line and 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 and do the same thing on this side where I'm just drawing those boundary lines and reconnecting it back at the front here and you can see it got a little squirrely with that I'm going to go ahead and just trim those boundary lines together and one of the things that we want to make sure of as we're doing this is making sure that you know we still have the ability to modify our model elements and so 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 screw up your model while you're creating your area plan so now I've got my area set for the level 2 and let me make sure it's picking the whole thing and that looks pretty good 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 and 19,825.51 so round it up to 826 square feet here and I'm just going to rename this one to be level 2 gross area and 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 and then we can hop over to level 1 and do the same thing so 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 and even though we did a quick sweep I just want to do a double check again and make sure that this is good here 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 but 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 and 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 gonna 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 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