Learn how to create an effective area plan starting from the architecture tab to creating level plans and area boundaries. Understand the importance of adding areas, using area tags and managing areas that are open to below to avoid double counting.
Key Insights
- The architecture tab is the starting point for creating an area plan, allowing you to choose the type of plan and the level it's based on.
- Area boundaries are essential to define the scope of the area; it's advisable to draw these lines manually for greater control and accuracy instead of relying on automatic boundaries.
- Adding areas and using area tags provide the square footage of each level; it's important to carefully manage areas open to below to avoid counting these spaces twice.
Our first step when creating an area plan is to simply create that plan. So what we'll do is from our architecture tab you can see here that we have the area option and from here we can go ahead and create an area plan. Now what we'll get here is a dialog box that's going to pop up and it's going to give us the option to create the type of plan that we want and then also which level we want to base this off of.
So I'm going to change this to gross building and because we want a gross building or a gross area plan for both level one and level two I can hold down CTRL and select level two as well and then both of these plans will be created at the same time. So I'll hit okay. It's going to ask me if I want to create boundary lines associated with the exterior walls and I've had good luck with this.
I've also had bad luck with this. So my advice here is to say no. You can say yes but then chances are you're just gonna have to go back and edit the boundary lines anyway.
So I'm going to say no and we'll create them ourselves automatically. We're going to get the same option for the second plan that we're creating. We'll go ahead and say no to that one as well and now you can see here we've got our level two area plan but if you notice in the project browser nothing is showing up here and that's because it's it's given its own category for gross building area plans.
We've got level one and we've got level two. So I'll go ahead and jump to level one and we'll start here and the first thing that we're going to want to do is create our area boundary so that we can then add our area. Sticking with the architecture tab here we'll go to area boundary and just like a lot of our other boundary line options we can draw lines or we can pick lines.
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Again this is a preference thing. I prefer to just draw lines because then I have more control over where I'm placing it. So for this exercise I'm going to go through and I will go ahead and just trace around the boundary of my building and because we only have so many exterior walls I mean this thing's almost exactly a rectangle except for this portion.
It doesn't take too long so it's not that big of a deal to skip out on the automatic created and that gives us our boundary here for level one. The next thing we can do is we can actually add the area. The first time we selected area plan this time we're going to go with area and so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and just place that and you can see we get the square footage here.
This is an area tag that was automatically or already loaded into the project and so now we have an area that's representing our gross area on level one. If we go to our level two area plan we can do the same thing. We'll start with adding our area boundary and I'll use the draw lines again and just make my way around the building.
This one's going to be a little different though because there's a couple portions of the building that are open to below and so we don't want to count those areas twice. So I'll just go through and finalize that one and then we've got this portion of the stair which we've already counted this floor area on level one so we don't want to count it again. So I'll draw an area boundary this time I'll use the rectangle and I'll go ahead and just close out this portion here.
You can see I'm just blocking out where the stair is so I'll do the same thing on the south stair area boundary using a rectangle and I'll go ahead and select this area. Now we have this portion here that is open to below as well so I can go ahead and I can just draw the boundary using the boundary of the walls and counting the curtain wall here going across like you see and then closing it out by hitting this wall and creating this space as an opening. Just like on level one our next step here is going to be to add the area and place it in in the space.
Now when we come to scheduling you'll notice that if I have both level one and level two named area it'll be hard to distinguish between the two so I'm going to rename the area that I have on level one instead of area I'll just call it level one and then I'll do the same thing on level two rename this one to level two. And now we have our gross area set up for both level one and level two.
