How to calculate Gross Building Volume

[adrian.troendle]

Hello everybody!
I need a tool or Plug-in for Revit to calculate Building Gross Volume. This means that Revit should calculate

the volume from the exterior surfaces - walls, roof and floor in the Underground level.
I have tried so far with creating separate plan views with one big Room for the whole level (because only 'Rooms' have option for Volume and the 'Areas' are only for 2D measurements). But since the 'Room' exist in all views this generates a lot of errors.
Second solution was to make Masses afterwards, but for a more complex project and for Roof with Dormers and so on it is impossible to model every single volume again.
It is important to state that I need to schedule these volumes, because those documents are later given to Municipality with the whole documentation (I am in Germany) and it has to give also each measure - width, length and height.

I hope someone has a solution, because in this older post there isn't any:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/building-volume/idc-p/8710325#M26437

[bill_gilliss]

A year or so ago, I needed to make a small solid model of a building so that it could be cast in metal for a desk ornament. (Stay with me here.) I ended up exporting the model in ACIS format, opening it in AutoCAD, and adding and unioning internal solids until it was one solid lump, whose volume was simply one of its reported properties. Perhaps you could take a similar approach.

Here's a possibly faster way that doesn't require finding and filling all the voids:

1. export as ACIS as before, open in AutoCAD
2. encase in a larger cube of solid material
3. subtract the model from the cube, leaving the model's internal volumes as floating solids
4. use the AutoCAD SEPARATE command to free these solids from the cube
5. erase the separated interior volumes, leaving the cube with a single void in the shape of your building
6. create another cube the same size as the first
7. subtract cube #1 from cube #2, leaving a single solid in the shape of your building.

Good luck!

[adrian.troendle]

Thank you for the reply, Bill.
This idea could work, but we do not have AutoCAD. I was told that this approach can be implemented in Dynamo, but I am still not good at it.
I will continue looking for a solution.

[jonas_eckardt]

Hi there, 

did you find any solution for you problem or how did you solve it?

Being stuck at the same problem right now...

[gtarch]

If rooms would work, why not put the "volume rooms" into a separate phase?

[blank...]

@MiWolff commented in this idea thread a suggestion to use ceilings for volume calculation? Any idea how that would work? Without manually sloping each and every ceiling you create for each and ever roof dormer, cricket, segment, creating a bunch of ceiling types for different building heights...

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-ideas/building-volume/idc-p/8710325#M26437

[e.chausheva]

Hi! In order to have one big room per floor, I create a phase which is prior to phase "existing", so it is my very first phase. Then with Room separating lines I draw over the plan, and at the end create the rooms, which can be scheduled later on. For the roofs, I duplicate them, and place them above the real roof to create the top border. All the created elements exist only in this phase. Still, this is not the best solution, especially when having a complex roof with dormers and openings, but it works for now. Autodesk developers should think about better way to calculate volumes.