How to extract floor surfaces fast ?

[Angayo]

The purpose is to develop a method for extracting floor surfaces of rooms to get them into a spreadsheet to determine how much ventilation is required in the various rooms.

The drawings are made by a third parties, but can be modified.

The most straightforward way to proceed is to draw polylines around the rooms and use the area function to get the surface. That is a lot of dumb work for hundreds of rooms.

Autocad has something called spaces. I wonder whether, if I can figure these out, that would provide a faster way to get the floor areas. (My preleminary tests show that Autocad doesn’t always choose the space correctly.) Or is there another way to do that faster ?

Thanks for your help.

[MetalFingerz]

Spaces mixed with property sets are quite powerful. I'm not a native english speaker so it would quite difficult for me to explain the whole thing to you. Here's a screencast that'll help you understand the principle :

[David_W_Koch]

Are the Walls represented by Lines or Polylines (or Arcs, if you have curved Walls) -OR- are they represented by AutoCAD Architecture Walls?

If you have Walls, you could quickly add Spaces to all areas enclosed by Walls.

If you have AutoCAD linework, you could still make the linework room-bounding, but then you will have the issue of dealing with Doors and other Openings.  What happens at Doors and Openings?  Is a header drawn (possibly in dashed lines) that extends the Wall lines across the Door opening?  If so, you could make those lines and the Wall lines room bounding and quickly add Spaces.  If not, you would have to add room boundary lines, as the typical graphics for showing a door in an architectural plan would not be suitable as a Space boundary.

[Angayo]

Thanks for the advice.

The drawings are made by others, often not in Autocad. When the drawings are converted to Autocad, the walls are converted to poly(lines), so that is what we usually have to deal with.

In the example drawing there  are lines delimiting the doors and they can be made room-bounding.

The procedure with polylines would be as follows.

1. Create and Xref. This will probably be done anyway to get other standardized information related to energy performance.
2. Draw polylines around a number of rooms.
3. For each room measure the surface area with the area function and type it in a spreadsheet. This step may be speeded up with a VBA tool that would export properties of several polylines simultaneously to a spreadsheet.
4. Draw the next batch of polylines.

…

With spaces, as I understand it, if it is a converted drawing, the procedure would look as follows.

1. Prepare the drawing, e.g. by exploding blocks and setting boundaries of certain layers to yes.
2. Create spaces with a space function by clicking in different rooms.
3. Correct the spaces that are wrongly chosen.
4. Use a schedule tool to get a table of surfaces.
5. Export the schedule to a spreadsheet.
6. Create the next batch of spaces.

…

In order for the second method to be faster, most spaces should be correctly created by Autocad and correcting the wrong spaces should be easy, as I assume mistakes are unavoidable. Is that a reasonable expectation ?

Advantage of spaces :

- one learns to use spaces

- probably faster with a genuine Autocad drawing

- other information is easier to extract

Disadvantage of spaces :

- learning time

- much more complicated and thus many more problems and time-waste to be expected.

[MetalFingerz]

There is an alternative way that would be right in the middle, which is to actually draw the spaces which may be your best bet if you don't have too many rooms :

[MetalFingerz]

Also considering you don't know  much about spaces (yet), I made you a screencast so you could follow the instructions to create a simple room ecosystem with spaces and schedule. It seems that you don't need more than names and areas for your spaces so I restricted the data associated with spaces to those. Note that I set the room name to be an auto-incrementing integer (with a "Room" prefix) : this could be bad practice if you're dealing with databases that may expect a room name to be text.

[Angayo]

Thanks you for the screencasts. The first is hard to follow : there is no sound, there is a language mismatch and a version mismatch.

It suggested though that it is possible to modify spaces, so I looked for a way to do it : the function spacevertexmodify appears to work in my version. Unfortunately the author of Autocad help didn’t know about that function. Sometimes it appears in the command list when one selects a space and right-clicks. Typing it is an alternative.

I followed the second screencast and I managed to understand most of it. I have a few questions though.

Is there a way to automatically tag the rooms ? Without tags the best is probaly to sort the schedule alphabetically and remember the drawing order. Assigning names (like ‘living room’) to several rooms simultaneously appears to work.

(The procedure described in the help in ‘To Export a Schedule’ is wrong.)

Is there a way to export to an existing file, rather than overwriting one or alternatively, is there a way to export multiple schedules simultaneously ?

Is there a way to export to an xlsx file ?