Autodesk Revit – 3 Ways to Schedule Floor Areas #techtuesday

#Techtuesday

In this video we are going to look at three different ways you can capture areas within a Revit project.
So here we have a set of apartments, we have separate types of units, separate apartments and within those different rooms and room sizes.

So I’m just going to show you 3 different ways to capture floor areas and room areas within a Revit project.

Setting up Floor Areas in Revit with Room Tags

So the first way you would capture floor areas is by using a room tag, simply just going to your architecture tab and just dropping in your room tags. So what we will do is load in a tag, so we’re going to start dropping in rooms here. and you just click in the room and the walls of the apartment are defined as room bounding. So can just place a room in each room and it will find the binding wall within each of those elements.
So I am going to select this particular room and it shows me the floor area of that room and if I in fact select one of these walls it shows me that this particular wall is room bounding. So that means if I were to disable room bounding the floor area would not be found by using that wall, it would probably spill into the next room. So that’s how you create a very simple room area using room tags.

Setting up Floor Areas in Revit with Place Spaces

That’s one way of doing it, another way you can also do it and this may be slightly non-conventional. You can use something called space tags, which are primarily used in MEP models and will be used extensively by MEP engineers and modellers on a BIM project but the reason that you might use them is if I go to analyse, so here I can place spaces. Spaces are separate to rooms, you can interlink them to a degree, whereas if you create rooms you can them to recreate as a space but to place spaces, the reason I use spaces is to associate with individual apartments or houses, is because when you place them, they have slightly different properties. So we can start placing these spaces in here and we have a series of spaces created.

Now what I can do with a space that I cannot do with a room is that you can create something called zones. Zones allow you to collate a series of spaces into a single zone. I going to go to edit zone, add a space, so what I’m going to do is multiple select all of these spaces that I have placed. So I am going to be able to associate these with each apartment because they are in a single zone. So you see if I hover over here, it won’t allow me to add a room tag to the zone, so you can’t use room tags within the zone, they are completely independent. So you can see when I hover over here now it gives me all of the space tags that have been placed. If I come to the lefthand side here I can look at the schedules. So if I go into my schedule on the left-hand side I’ve got a room schedule. So my room schedule, we will turn on the names and numbers of the room schedule. So then you can see all the rooms that have been placed in here. It only contains the rooms, not the spaces because when you create a space schedule it is separate to a room schedule. So we have a space schedule here and we can see all the spaces here. So these are all associated with a zone. The apartment number could be the zone for example.

So if I now want to place another zone within a separate apartment and give it a number, go to analyse, go to space and drop in the spaces and then create a zone of those spaces. Select all of the individual spaces, it will automatically give it a new number. and it will sort it into different spaces. And I can rename the spaces accordingly. Once named we can sort the list by zone and separate it into different apartments.

Be aware that then when adding all the rooms together it will only measure the rooms not the interconnecting spaces and partitions.

Setting up Floor Areas in Revit with Space Tags

The third way is to use space tags. Go to the architecture tag. I’m going to create an area plan. So this creates a separate plan view, whilst allowing you to place separate boundary lines. So I can choose the same floor plan. I’m going to go into area boundary and it’s going to let me select separate area boundaries. So you can apply the area rules,or you can get it to lock to the individual walls.

So I am going to select an external wall, and we are only going to capture the internal floor area of the apartment. If any of these walls move, as we’ve locked those particular lines, they will move with each of those walls. On the left, it has created a separate area plan. What I can now do is create an area schedule for that apartment. I need to place an area tag in here too. I can place my area tag and it gives me the total area of all of those external boundaries. This is separate to space and room tags. With this information, you can then export the total size area information of the design. This will export as a .txt file and you can do the same with the space schedule and the same with the room schedule.

To summarise

– you can create a separate area plan
– you can create a room schedule with independent room tags
– or you can create a space schedule and place that on a zone

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Quadra Solutions Ltd specialise in design and data management software solutions for the manufacturing, construction, engineering and PCB design industries. Quadra is a Gold Autodesk Partner, an accredited training centre and specialists in electronic and PCB design. We provide Autodesk Design software solutions for the Construction and Manufacturing industries. Inventor, Revit, AutoCAD, Collections and Vault software helps our customers design, visualise, innovate and implement solutions that help customers grow and develop their business.

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