Spaces and room finishes

[Yancka]

I'm working on spaces & room finishes and having few issues.

1. Spaces for staircase. It's necessary to be with auto-boundary for 2 reasons. Nr.1 is for updating space if walls are changed. Nr.2 is for having correct perimeter in schedules (it's used in formulas to calculate area of finish materials). But for floor and ceiling the area is much less because most of the space among walls is empty (or - is filled with stair). In space schedule and plan view I need to display only area where there is floor really. How others solve this? Currently I'm making it by displaying custom area, where the value is multiplied by specified percentage which I calculate for each staircase space manually.

2. Spaces as 3D objects. If actual room where people are going to live in is upper floor, in many occasions some part of ceiling is determined by roof with slope and some part by real ceiling. In such case the ceiling area which requires some finish is higher than area of space. How do you deal with calculating ceiling finish area in such situations?

3. This is connected to previous issue. Where I live there are some specific requirements about displaying the space area for rooms which in some part are determined by roof slopes. It's required to show the value of space where it is 1.60m or higher. It is called "usable" area I think. It would mean that in case the ceiling hight in the corner is 1.00m, I'd calculate where the height is 1.60, then would draw dashed line to represent the "usable" area. On the plan and in the schedules I'd include the "usable" area but for calculating amount of room finishes materials I would use the actual area. Has VW any possibilities to calculate and display "usable" area automatically?

I know AutoCAD Architecture software allows to create 3D spaces which are determined by surrounding elements such as walls, roofs and slabs. I'm not sure if it allows to do what I want, I'm just showing the direction that other softwares appear to have better solutions for this particular issue.

4. I played around with Room Schedules and reports. My current opinion is - well, does the Room Finish possibilities possessed with Space object offer anything more than would be achievable by simply attaching Record Formats to Spaces? I'm looking for solution which would allow to me to define for the Space and later retrieve automatically in the schedules following information:

* total area of ceiling or walls, with or without openings included - for having sq.m. of plaster

* total area of paint or other material which might be applied to the walls or ceiling

* There are occasions when 2 or more varying materials are applied to same wall, I'd like to retrieve total area of each of those materials.

The best I can think is to attach record formats to spaces and calculate for each space manually each material. Or, in case when certain paint is up to certain height (say, 1.50m) and the rest is covered by other paint, I'd use a field in record format to identify the height and then in schedule multiply the perimeter with this number. The upper paint would be overall height minus that number. And it still doesn't solve the question about counting openings out. How do you - others deal with getting amount of finish materials which are used unevenly (say, tiles for bathroom)?