Combine area plans with floor plans

[rspierenburg]

Can we just consolidate Unit plans and Floor Plans into one?  I have no idea why Area plans need to be separate from Floor plans.  Our clients constantly want to see unit blowups for each unit type which includes areas.  As it stands now I have to make a new area plan (separate from my unit plans dependant views) for each unit type and then overlay each one on a sheet which may contain 4 unit blowups.

If I could simply ADD areas to my Unit Plan Parent view right off the bat then it would save me a lot of time.  And for those who's workflow includes needing separate Area Plan views, just duplicate the Plan view and adjust the view template.

We don't have separate floor finish plans so why separate area plans?

Robert

[eric.stimmel]

In multifamily residential projects, being able to overlay Areas (used to represent the entire Unit - 2 bedroom/1 bath, 1 bedroom/1bath, studio, etc) and Rooms (representing the individual rooms of a unit - bedroom, kitchen, bath, etc) would be great. It's problematic from a graphical standpoint (can't tag units and rooms in the same plan) and from a workflow standpoint (team has to understand that these are tracked separately and can't be combined) and I would love to see an option to somehow display these in the same Floor Plan view (yes, we can display them in the same Area Plans, but Area Plans are limited in their functionality and using them for all of our plans presents other problems that using Floor Plans doesn't - aside from the muddiness of explaining that to a team). But I'm not sold on just combining the two. There are other use cases where having various Area Plans to show departments or fire separation or other arbitrary boundaries is useful and, I think, Revit would be worse without them.

Maybe allowing Area Plans to be used as an Underlay to a Floor Plan would solve the problem or adding some functionality to address a collection of rooms as a new element type that could create a dynamic boundary around a collection of contiguous rooms?

I like the sentiment of this idea, but I don't really agree with the proposal of combining Floor and Area plans into one thing.

[Anonymous]

My sorry for my ignorance, Eric, but what exactly is the limitations of Area Plans?

In my opinion, because area bondaries behave like model lines, with a especific floor and not view dependent, it doesn't make sense that we can't get that info in any normal plan view.

Right now all my site plans are made in an Area Plan because that way I can tag the area and see the border line (or shade if need be) without having to duplicate information and having to relly in a manual update every time I need to make a change. 

Why can't I have that in a normal plan view, I don't get it...

[rspierenburg]

Susan - The largest limitations is that you cannot have duplicates of an Area plan.

Eric - I disagree with the need of Area plans as separate entities.  If you add the Area Plan functionality to Floor plans then if you needed an Area plan for say Department Layout etc you could just duplicate the Plan view and adjust as needed.  We currently us a duplicate floor plan view for all of our Fire Separation drawings without issues.

Robert

[Anonymous]

Hello @rspierenburg,

Since when we can't duplicate Area Plans?! We can do as many duplicates as we want, even duplicate as dependent.

With apropriate view templates you can hide all the info for the Areas and treat them exactly as a normal Floor Plan (as far as I know...). The other way arround, the way we are talking about, it's impossible right now. We can't get Area info to show on an normal Floor Plan... Or Ceiling Plan, by the way... This could be solve, maybe with some kind of overlay, but I don't really see the point because as far as I'm conserned Area Plans as an independent tipe of view is just redundant...

[rspierenburg]

@Anonymous,

You are absolutely correct.  I'm not sure why I thought you couldn't duplicate area plans.  In that case I'm interested in trying to use Area Plans for floor plans and see how that goes.

Robert

[eric.stimmel]

@Anonymous - It's possible the limitations I've run into with Area Plans could be resolved (with a little work) by folding Area Plans into Floor Plans. I read this suggestions as simply flattening down the view families (Area Plan and Floor Plan) into one family (Floor Plan) with just one set of Rooms and one set of Areas, overlayed in the same views. There was no mention of Area Schemes. This may just have been an oversight, but I think the ability to have multiple, discrete Area Schemes is useful. This could be addressed, but presents a more difficult challenge than how this suggestion makes it sound.

The problems I have run into are:

1. Area Plans cannot have different types. We use different Floor Plan types extensively in conjunction with View Filters and View Templates, so this is a step backwards in terms of setup and automation. 

2. Area Plans cannot callout to Floor Plans - obviously, this is just a further part of the problem identified above (and would not be a problem if there were no longer Area Plans), but means all plans really need to be Area Plans if used in this way.

3. The ability to have multiple Area Schemes is necessary because there are different aggregations of area that are desirable (often required). For example, Gross Area of a floor and Apartment Unit and (arbitrarily defined) Programmatic Area. These divisions do not necessarily follow Room boundaries (for example in an office space, often times half of a corridor is part of one department and half part of another).

Again, it's possible that something like merging Area Plans and Floor Plans could solve these issues, but the solution would have to take these things into account.

[Anonymous]

Hi @eric.stimmel!

Thank you so much for your input. That's exactly what I was looking for when I asked for limitations. So far I've only used this method for site plans, to get real areas for the footprint of buildings and green areas of the property. I've never used it in full extent.

You are totally right:

1. Not be able to have diferent types for areas is an important handicap.

2. The callouts could have a smaller impact because I know people usually have a separate master floor plan from where the extract the callouts, so they don't lose track of those. But still  is very good to know.

3. I agree with you. We should be able to have diferent type of area schemes, that couldn't be showned together because they could intersect.

I would like the ability to turn the visibility on of one especific area type in one floor plan view. Just like an overlay or something.

This way we could, by changing just that option, alternate between a gross area plan and some other tipe of area plan (as long as the information is in the same level, of course).

I hope Autodesk use this little brainstorm to get some ideas, and thy to do their best to improve this feature.

Thanks again, Eric!

[MichaelRuehr]

Fixing the Callout and Reference issue and allow them to be used as Underlay

should Fix the biggest Issues

[blro.]

One step further would be to allow more than one area scheme on the same plan. If area schemes and their boundary lines were to be treated like subcategories they could be organized, controlled and shown all from the same place without having to overlay multiple copies on the same sheet. We could then have fire separation, units, rooms, and all else in the same place. While we're at it, it'd be worth making areas 3D so they'd be taggable in section as well.

[Anonymous]

@blro. is right, it should be great to show total floor plan area, at the same time with the fractions areas. We could have a sub-area line type for each "area type" to be able to mix the information in the same view.

Also the 3D aspect would be great not really in section but in real 3D with axonometric/perspective floor plans, for example.

How many useful ideas does Autodesk needs to implement this feature?

[KMH0323]

Very helpful post. We are a multi-family firm (up to 6 stories) and use Area Plans for all "Building" and "Unit" views. We communicate overall floor and unit areas to the client and city this way. We use Floor Plans single-space enlarged plans. We freely overlay Areas and Rooms as needed for the drawing's purpose. 

The limitations listed above are well-noted. Silver lining that we are on LT -- no filters lol.

We NEED the ability to have multiple Area Schemes condense into one single Schedule. I can see this solved with sub-categories of multiple Areas on a single Area plan, as mentioned above. Otherwise, the workflows with Areas are highly redundant. One design change required shifting identical Area Boundaries on different Area Plans just to update multiple schedules. 

[jan.debieMA2QR]

I first tried to combine all area plans into 1 by adding extra parameters. But this doesnt work since gross and nett (rentable)areas have different boundaries, so multiple area plans are indeed needed.

our workaround is to do all annotations on the floor plan(wich, after permission would evolve to an execution drawing) and superpose the desired area plans on the sheets. I simply hide floors, after wich all annotations are visible again on the sheet and in pdf. Furthermore, we use the same workaround to superpose ceiling plans, since all height dimensions are needed in permission phase. Biggest issue is the unability to easily select those biews on the sheet.

in execution phase i believe area plans become less important, and could be provided on smaller scales, as for ceiling plans, they should become a separate sheet.