How to easily measure outside area of building ?

[Angayo]

I need to be able retrieve data from buildings. One of those types of date is areas of outside surfaces. Things like how much wall and window the office section has oriented south. The point is to do calculations according to a Belgian standard to meet norms. Revit’s built-in energy analysis tools are unlikely to meet those standards.

Here is a building complex were that must be done :

 

So far I don’t see anything better than to paintstakingly go over the exterior of the building, creating additional views where neccessary, measuring, entering the data in a spreadsheet and doing calculations there to enter the date into EPB software.

Walls have surface areas that may help.

Windows have dimensions, from which an area property can probably be derived, wich may help.

Nonetheless it promises to be tedious.

The South-East façade (in the bottom right) illustrates that :

The wall comes higher than the roof and the roof is slightly triangular.

The windows have window panels, which are larger than the windows.

The façade area – window panels  > wall area by 6m² !?

In Autocad one can draw polylines around surfaces one wants the area of. That does not appear to be the case in Revit.

Are there some Revit features that than help reduce the amount of work ?

[Sahay_R]

Have you thought of using wall tags? Is this what you were looking for? 

Family attached (Revit 2017). You should also be able to schedule these tags to obtain a grand total.

[FGPerraudin]

Or you could add a project parameter to your walls (i.e. South-North, etc),

Filter and group accordingly,

And let Revit calculate Area per associated parameter?

Dynamo could help you a lot there as well, as it will let you pick walls, select hosted windows and get their values as well...?

François-Gabriel Perraudin

[FGPerraudin]

Oh and by the way, 

Filled regions have area properties as well... (annotate > region)

If you want to proceed the old way!

François

[Angayo]

Thanks for the ideas;

I solved the 6m² discrepancy : unlike I assumed, the window panels on both floors were not identical. Of course, the result still needs to be corrected due the first two reasons I gave in post 1.

I don’t see the added value of wall tags, nor of their grand total. I could schedule the walls themselves.

Adding an orientation to walls may be helpful. Having a list of walls with areas and orientations would only be an approximation of what I want, as illustrated with my example.

The purpose of Dynamo appears to be to design geometric objects, not to extract information from Revit projects. Is selecting much easier in Dynamo than in Revit ?

Filled regions may serve as a substitute for Autocad polylines.

[FGPerraudin]

Actually dynamo is just a friendly programming interface for Revit.

Its most impressive use is to design complex geometry,

But its most useful day-to-day use is to extract and transform data (i.e. surfaces).

One very simple but explanatory use is that of copying the value of a parameter into another one routinely (instead of inputing it by hand).

Or interact with Excel in a dynamic way (modifying the excel spreadsheet modifies the revit file), which you can imagine can save extraordinary amounts of time.

Problem: it requires a bit of training, so worth it if you plan on using it now and again!

François-Gabriel

[Angayo]

Thanks you for the information.

I have noticed there are things called APIs, gbXML and macros. Is Dynamo basically a fleshed-out API ?