Creating Area Plans in Revit: Letting the Software Draw Boundary Lines

Now, as we close up this lesson, I wanted to do a couple of demonstrations for you just to show what happens when we allow Revit to draw our boundary lines. So, I've rewound back to the end of our previous lesson, and we're going to go ahead and create area plans, one for rentable and one for gross building. We'll start with the gross building, and we'll allow Revit to create that boundary line for us.

In a lot of cases, this works out pretty well, but in a lot of cases, it also doesn't. So, it just depends on the geometry of your building and how much flexibility you want when creating these area boundaries. If you want total control, you already know the answer.

You don't want to let the computer create it for you, but if you're okay with a little flexibility, then by all means let it happen. We'll go ahead and stick with the gross building level one, and I'll just hit OK. And this time I'm going to go ahead and say yes to draw those boundary lines.

In this case, you can see that, because the geometry of our building is pretty good, everything worked out in our favor. One of the things you'll notice is that you will end up with odd overlaps or what seem to be gaps within the building area. But that's really not an issue because, as you can see, when I add the area in here, it will go ahead and place it for us without any problem.

And because I went in and created it or allowed Revit to create the boundary for me, it automatically created the area as well. So, it would have saved us a couple of steps. So, you can see that if I do the same thing for level two of the gross building and allow it to create the walls and the associated area, it will go in and do the same thing.

The one thing we're noticing is that these spaces still need to be broken out because we don't want to count them twice. But it does give you the option to create that area. A lot of times, when I do this, I find that I end up making so many modifications to these lines that it's not necessarily worth it.

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But if you have a simple building like the one you see here, then it might be a viable option for you. Let's take a look at what happens when we create an area plan using the rentable option. So, I'll use level one as our basis, and then we'll go ahead and hit OK.

We'll go ahead and say yes to create those boundary lines. And what this will do for us is it will literally create that interior boundary line. And this is not a bad option.

It uses the drip line or the face of the window as the boundary line here for us. So, it gives us a good option for calculating that area. If you had different rules you wanted to follow, you can go ahead and make those adjustments yourself.

Another option we have is area and volume computations. If I click on the room and area panel here, I have options for area and volume computations. You can see that the computations are for area only by default.

We can have it calculate volume, but it's not something we typically use. Room area can be adjusted to the center of the wall, core layer, or core center. But we typically just stick with the wall finish.

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For area schemes, you can see that we have our gross and rentable schemes, which are just schemes you can add to the project. If you want to do something more than just gross and rentable, you can give it a description based on how you're using it.

If you're using a specific method like BOMA, you can add a new one here, and it could be a rentable scheme you're adding. Then, you can give it a description, like BOMA or whatever year it may be, and add more detail with your custom description.

All that's going to do is give you another option. Instead of just gross building and rentable, you now have a third one for BOMA as well.