Floor area

[Kea]

Dear VectorWorks Community Worldwide,

I have a plan of a house made with wall tools. Is there a "stamp tool" (as in Archicad) or some other way to calculate individual floor areas within wall boundaries? At the moment I'm using VectorWorks 8.5 / mac.

Sincerely yours,

Christa

[Robert Anderson]

Managing areas of spaces is one feature that we have been continually working on in VectorWorks Architect. In VWA9 and later is a command "Net Area Polys" that will automatically create all the room polygons from your walls. Then you can list them for area and perimeter, etc.

[Kea]

Ok. I thought it would have been one of the basic features for a long time... Well, suppose I have one more reason to upgrade (to VW Architect) soon. Thanks for a quick reply!

Christa

[Guest]

Christa, You can still get the area for your house/building with a series of polygons.

If you trace the floor plan over with a polygon, or just a room with a polygon, you can get the area reading for that polygon in the Object Info Palette.

To get the area of the house, draw a polygon along the perimeter of the walls. With the polygon selected, the OIP at the bottom gives you an Area: calculation. You can make a side note of this, or keep the polygon for quick reference.

A good way to organize this is to put the room or floor polygons in their own class and only make that class active as you need the area measurements.

Of course, if you make changes to the floor plan, you will need to redraw the polygons.

To go one step further, you can select the polygon, get the area reading from the OIP and put a text block in the middle of the polygon with the area measurement. Then group the text and that polygon. Now you have a quick reference for the area of a room or individual floor, depending on how you set it up.

Personally, I just draw the polygon of the exterior walls in pen color purple. Then I would go over the same floor and draw individual room polygons in brown for instance.

P.S. I'm not partial, but you should still upgrade to VW Arch 9.x. It has alot of new features not included in VW 8 and VW Architect 1.0.1. !

[ 03-29-2002: Message edited by: Katie ]

[Kea]

Katie,

thanks for hints; drawing polygons is just what I'm used to do. The only problem is, that now there're about 75 apts in my project, and many curvy walls... In this sketchy state it's really a time consuming way to work.

[Petri Sakkinen]

Christa,

If you don't want to spend money on VWA, my 'Simple Space' object is on VectorDepot. You can also modify it as the code is not locked. In addition, if you already / preferably draw polygons, you can vonvert them to Simple Spaces with the scripts that come with the PIO.

If you want to stay with polygons, there are scripts aroung for creating area stamps, but they don't update automatically as in ArchiCAD. My script combo sort of semi-automatically do it and I have been thinking of writing a fully automatic area stamp - maybe one of these days...

[bclydeb]

http://www.nemetschek.net/ubb/images/icons/smile.gifChrista, Et. Al.

I have been using ploygons for room areas for years along with spreadsheets. Whenever a room changes or a building outline changes, the spreadsheet recalc auto updates the info. The spreadsheet also can be displayed and plotted as part of the drawing. Here's what to do:Ceate a new layer or class. I prefer classes because classes unify information and layers separate info.Draw the ploygonGo to the Object Info dialog and select the data tab. Give the ploygon a name. e.g. dining_room.Construct a spreadsheet. Using the database feature, reference your area polygon class as the first criterion and add a criterion for kind=polygon.For the first column set the criterion to =(N) to get the spreadsheet to list the named polygons.for the 2nd column set the formula to =(Area). All the areas will show.Below the database set you can total all the areas.If you are interested in only gross areas - such as apt unit by type and total building areas draw the perimeter polygons for each unit or building and give them unique names. e.g. apt_1_BldgA, Apt2_BldgA, etc.The spreadhseet database will display each building by name or each apartment by name and their corresponding areas.This spreadsheeting the areas helps in creating "site analysis" blocks for planning departments and so on. The beauty of this methodology is that you can change any individual polygon and the spreadsheet recalc updates the whole picture for you.The main drawback is that you generate a lot of Names in the database and you can't copy/duplicate say an apartment plan and expect the database to duplicate the names for the spreadsheet - you have to uniquely name each area set.One idea I haven't tried is creating a database tag for each polygon and linking it to the area polygons. This may allow making a symbol out of the polygon groups and creating the "stamp" effect you are looking for. You would still use the spreadsheet to extract the polygon data but the database criterion would reference the data record to pick the ploygons.If this short dissertations is clear as mud, e-mail me clydeark@pacbell.net and I will send you an example file of what I do. It is less work and "hand tracking" than Katie's suggestion. And it allows you to continue to use your present VW version until you can upgrade. Plus the technique works in VW9.5 - as well as in Architect and in Landmark.