Revit provides two default Area Schemes in the stock (Imperial) templates;Gross Building (can't be deleted) and Rentable. When we want to create an Area Plan view Revit expects us to choose a scheme. The additional scheme in the following image is one I created (Retail Zones).
What isn't obvious, without a little digging, is that we can create more schemes. This is important because it does no good to attempt to reuse an existing scheme for additional plan views. They remain biased toward displaying whatever boundaries we've created already. Creating more area schemes begins here Architecture ribbon tab > Room & Area panel drop down > Area and Volume Computations > Area Schemes Tab.
Once you've made it here you can create new or delete existing area schemes. As mentioned earlier Revit's locked down the Gross Building scheme.
Now you can return to creating a new Area Plan view and choose from among the new schemes you've created. If you intend to use a Color Fill Legend you also need to make sure you create a new legend type for your new area scheme.
What isn't obvious, without a little digging, is that we can create more schemes. This is important because it does no good to attempt to reuse an existing scheme for additional plan views. They remain biased toward displaying whatever boundaries we've created already. Creating more area schemes begins here Architecture ribbon tab > Room & Area panel drop down > Area and Volume Computations > Area Schemes Tab.
Once you've made it here you can create new or delete existing area schemes. As mentioned earlier Revit's locked down the Gross Building scheme.
Now you can return to creating a new Area Plan view and choose from among the new schemes you've created. If you intend to use a Color Fill Legend you also need to make sure you create a new legend type for your new area scheme.
15 comments:
Good morning Steve,
I just wanted to mention that since area schemes don't have a "design option" setting. Creating a new area scheme for each desired options becomes a viable solution. However, having multiple options in the project would increase quite considerably the amount of area schemes as well.
cheers.
Dirty little secret:
With most things Revit, you can't pre-populate a list. If a value isn't used, it drops off the list.
BUT! by using an Area Scheme, you can build a list of, say Departments in the Color Scheme and those values will always remain in the list, whether any Rooms use those Departments or not. You can't use it for everything, in fact, Departments are about the only useful parameter, but you can build up a list for your own Shared parameters.
For those of you that use area lines to define areas, have you ever constrained them to walls so they move when a wall moves? I have typically done egress and plumbing calculations with area plans but always end up drawing my own area lines (life safety scheme and plumbing fixtures scheme) since there is no way to automatically tell a room or area to calculate gross or net based on occupancy. The choices to let the software create your area lines is using all center or all faces of walls. I suppose one could error on the safe side, have inaccurate calcs and include more area in net occupancy calcs by using the wall center lines, but most of the time I am fighting to not add extra cost of more plumbing fixtures or stairs. Using the room object's area for occupancy calcs gets a ballpark number, but it's never exact. This is still one process that always seems to take more time than it should to update. Any brilliant ideas Steve? Manually constraining all of those area lines may bring a large project to a grinding halt.
It's my opinion that Rooms serve us well for those area calculations even if the requirements that some jurisdictions or clients disagree.
A room will only Report area based on one of four locations in a wall, the most common being Finish Face Interior. I think this is more "accurate" (for occupancy or design criteria) than using the wall center line because we can't occupy the interior of a wall.
If I'm trying to decide if we need another exit or toilet then the space people can actually use is reasonable to me as a basis for calculating those.
In contrast, the person making money from the area "you" lease from them is naturally interested in increasing that number even if you can't practically occupy or use it. That wall centerlines for interior partitions and exterior faces for exterior boundaries. It increases the area and increases the rent.
Then there is the whole discussion of "accuracy". When people say Revit isn't accurate they often don't recognize that term isn't as precise as people seem to think it is. It reminds me of the movie The Princess Bride, when Inigo says, "You keep using that word... I don't not think it means what you think it does".
I've been in a room where people are arguing about the inaccuracy of the area of a room when the difference is equal to the thickness of a single sheet of GWB spanning a long wall, for example 120 SF vs 121 SF, as in we added another layer of GWB for fire rating but now the room is 1 SF smaller. When we round off room area to the nearest SF those chopped off tenths and hundredths of a SF add up eventually.
If we are being charged $250 per SF then that's another $250 in the owner's pocket. But it didn't just make the room that much more useful or justify another exit unless we were so close to a threshold that we ought to provide the extra exit anyway.
"Living on the edge" of "minimum requirements" isn't a good habit anyway...
How do you create a second gross area scheme? After I create the first gross area scheme, I can only create endless additional rentable schemes.
Leaving Apply Rules checked does place boundaries based on "rentable" assumptions. If you remove that check you can place boundaries where you need them which will provide Gross Building like results.
Perhaps it is just me, but this setup seems a little backwards to me. Typically we want to show the area information on a plan drawing. Why Autodesk decided it was better to make a separate view dedicated to areas is beyond me. If I wanted a separate sheet with area calcs I would just duplicate the plans and show only area information.
Hi! This is slightly off the topic but my situation is this:
I would like to export from Revit one dwg that includes both Room Polylines and Area Polylines (along with the plan). Is this possible?
My 'problem' is that when I'm creating Area in Revit it goes to its own view and I have not figured out how to get it in the same view with the original plan, Rooms etc. Then again I can get Rooms & Areas in Area Plan but then I need to copy all the detail stuff, tags etc. to this new Area Plan View to be able to export a proper dwg.
I'd just xref the exported Area plan into the other DWG file after exporting both from Revit.
Hello Steve.
In adition to an early comment I´ll explain our question:
Sometimes, within some project files, when we create a new area scheme, Revit ask us for a type of area scheme (Gross building or Rentable). We can choose Gross building and its works fine. We do have several area schemes with the gross building area rules. Great, but WHY ONLY IN SOME PROJECTS?
I know what Revit help says: "When you create a new area scheme, it uses the type values from the Rentable area scheme".
For us it´s a random behavior!
Does anyone else have the same issue? (maybe isn't an issue, it's a good chance).
Thanks.
Pablo - I'm not sure I understand your question but I'll try. The Gross Building scheme is fixed and can only be used once per Level of a project. If you create a new Area Plan and choose Gross Building once you've done this for each level you are reusing the Gross Building scheme for another view...but it is still based on the single Gross Building Scheme.
When you create new Area Schemes they all use the Rentable logic Revit uses. You can create new Area Plans and associate them with one of your schemes until they have all been created and associated with the schemes you've made. Once they are all used you have the same issue as for the Gross Building scheme.
The only way to get unique Area Plans that use their own scheme is to create new Area Schemes and then create views assigned to them...and they'll all use Revit's Rentable logic.
You can only create one set of Area Plans associated with the Gross Building scheme, one for each level of the project.
Thanks for the answer Steve.
I know what you say is true, but it´s not completely true.
I just made a little discovery:
If you use Design Options into the project, you can set new area schemes with the Gross building area rules!!!
I believe occasionally Revit allows you to create additional gross schemes, but that appears to happen only occasionally and at random. Maybe it's a bug?
Pablo - Yes, very good observation and that makes sense since a each Design Option is very likely to require its own unique Gross Building area scheme.
Derek - Perhaps that is the "it varies" you are observing without noticing that subtlety?
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