calculating glazing percentage

[Anonymous]

I would like to know if (and how) Revit can caculate the exterior glazing percentage on a facade.

[Anonymous]

A multicategory schedule and a calculated value with some filters.

Basically you need a schedule that shows, Walls, doors and windows, and lists their family name, then filter out those that don't have glazing. Then do a percentage value of the total and sort by Glazing or wall. You'll need some trial and error before you get it right. If you are concerened with the frames messing up your calcs then I don't know how to do it. You would need to add additional shared parameters for glazed widht and height in each family.

[Anonymous]

The best way I've found to this, which my firm has to do a lot for town submittals, is with filled regions. Use one filled region to cover your facade and create another for your glazing area. If you select the filled region and look at the properties it gives you an area, unfortunately there is no way of actually scheduling this data because it is a detail element. The only other way I've found is to assign a facade to each window and use the glass extrusion from the window family, but you would still to use a filled region for the wall area unless your facade is completely flat. If anyone has found a better way of doing this I would be very interested also.

[RevitIt]

Like Scott says, if oyu do it often, add some parameter for glazing calculations in your families and then use those.

[Anonymous]

Adding the glazing calculation in the window family isn't the problem. How do you get a glazing percentage for a 2-D elevation when your building doesn't have a flat facade? You would have to individually select every wall and window on each floor you wanted to be part of that one facade calculation and then repeat for each elevation. At that point it is faster to just use filled regions in your elevation views, but once again you can't schedule them.

[Anonymous]

I wonder how Revit MEP handles this. They must have someway to designate the north, south east and west facades.

[kinkabobba]

I tried a few different methods here and the one that worked best for me is this:

Create a Material Take-Off Schedule for Windows, Curtain Walls--- whatever on your facade has glass.

From there you can get the total 'glazing' areas.

Then to get the total exterior wall surface, you have two good options.

1) Create a new material called something like 'For Surface Calculations' that wont' be confused with other materials. Apply that material to all of the systems/walls/doors/windows on your exterior. Do another Material Take-Off Schedule, this time for the 'For Surface Calculations' Material.

2) The first method was a little too complicated for me because I have a lot of my exterior systems occuring on the interior, so to separate the two would have been too difficult for me. So instead, I created a new mass form shaped exactly like my building (took me about 10 minutes. Hint: use the 'void' tool). Then I enabled energy modeling, and created a 'Mass Exterior Wall Schedule'. That also gives the total exterior facade surface area.

So then of course, you take your glazing sq. ft. and take it out of the total exterior facade surface area, and hopefully you're under 40%

hope that helps!

[Anonymous]

this is an old post - but...

nb: all sides are calculated through the material quantity process, including interior and exterior, and thin sides.  so watch out when comparing say, an exterior face to the glazing quantity, as the glazing will be counted 2.01 times the amount it should.

[Anonymous]

Actually, the first method worked and thanks for that. I was able to use to the 'Calculated Value' option and create a new row to half the actual glazing area so the approximate opening is calculated. This is tricky and not viable if you need the exact area of the window opening. There will be a difference of 1 SF +/_ because REVIT it calculating the whole surface area of the glass (so don't forget the sides of the glass will be counted too). I know most of you know this,, but newbies just beware. Try it before you use it.

[praktikant46FR6]

I elaborated a bit on the material schedule technique and got it to give me clean numbers.

1. Create a multi-category material-take off

2. In your window family, Paint (pt) with separate materials (e.g. 'glass - front') on the exterior face of the glass/framing etc.

If you are using void window families - that is, just the cut out in the family - for openings in the facade you can create an extrusion filling the whole void and apply Air material to the whole volume and then paint 'air - front' material to the front face of it. If you do have void window openings without this Air fill they are subtracted from the wall area but since it is just a void, they have no material and then there is no material being added to your material takeoff schedule.

If your walls have only one layer, I am assuming that they would also need to be painted. But it works perfectly without painting with with compound walls.

3. If you want to divide these calculations by facade you can use for example the comments parameter and input 'East', 'West' into the windows, openings, walls and doors.

4. Now you should have all your values, if you have a lot of materials it is going to be hard to find them all, but you could give all the necessary materials a common suffix or something so you can filter out the ones you need.

[tlagardeAJBTA]

That sounds very counter-productive