Overview of the area scheme toolset - Revit Tutorial

- [Tutor] Before launching Revit and actually starting to use the Area tools, I thought it would be useful for us to have a high level overview of what Area Schemes are and how they function within Revit. So let's start by talking about just exactly what is an Area Scheme. Well it's just a subdivision of space and you can use it for any purpose that you like, where you need to measure the areas of spaces within your building. Now these spaces, these subdivisions, are typically larger than rooms so you don't want to think of them as having any kind of parity with the rooms. You're typically not going to have a one-to-one relationship between the areas and the rooms within your model. They really serve two different purposes. Areas are based on boundaries and these boundary lines are lines that you just simply draw within an area of plan. Now those area boundaries can be static or they can be dynamic. So the static ones you can literally draw anywhere you want and they're going to stay where you place them. The dynamic ones on the other-hand will actually react to the surrounding geometry based on rules that are built into the Area Scheme. More on that in a few moments. So let's talk about the parts of an overall Area Scheme and I think it's important to understand that there are several pieces to the tool that you have to have in place before it starts to function in the way that you might expect. So, the first piece is creating an area plan. This is quite literally a custom floor plan, specifically for the purposes of creating area calculations and area elements. All of the Area tools will display only within their corresponding area plan. So it's kind of got an automatic visibility filter built into it which is rather nice. Area boundaries come next. So once you have an area plan, you draw boundary lines which are similar to room separation lines conceptually, but they're very specifically for the purposes of bounding areas. So area objects do not automatically react to building geometry. Rather what they do is they see the area boundary lines instead, however those area boundary lines can be based on geometry. So it's entirely up to you how you place those boundaries. Once you have your area boundaries, as long as they enclose the spaces that you want to measure, you actually add the area elements to do the measurement. So you really need to have the other things in place before you can get to the point of creating the area elements. Now optionally you can also use color fills with area plans. This just makes it easier for you to graphically distinguish one type of area from another, so it can make a really nice presentation view. And of course we can use schedules and tags with areas as well to create lists of all the areas or do sub-totalling and so on. There's a couple different kinds of schemes that we can work with within the Area tool set. So there are two built-in schemes, one called Gross Building and one called Rentable. These are based on rules and those rules are loosely based on BOMA. Now BOMA is the Building Owners and Managers Association and it has a series of standards and guidelines that are developed to help the commercial real estate industry determine how to charge leasing rates for different building configurations. So they have all sorts of guidelines based on the kind of space whether it's retail space or office space, and so on. It's typically used in the United States and Canada but it might be also used in other countries as well, so you're welcome to have the BOMA website here on screen, you're welcome to peruse their site and learn more, you can even become a member of BOMA. And they also have a series of standards that you can purchase so here's another page that's just the sort of, top-level page of their catalog store, or you can browse through the various standards that are available. Now the current standard was released in 2010. However the standard that's built into the Revit tools are actually based on the earlier 1996 standard. So that means that if you bought the latest standard from BOMA, it would actually be a little bit more robust than what the Revit tool's able to do automatically. However because we're able to create area boundary lines that are both dynamic and static, in other words based on the rules or placed manually, we do have the flexibility to create an area plan that conforms to the current standard if we wish, it just means that we'll be doing a little bit more of that work on a manual basis instead of relying on the automation. Now in addition to the built-in schemes, you can also create custom schemes. Now a custom scheme is really just a copy of one of the existing schemes, so it will inherit the rules from that copied scheme, but you can just simply ignore those schemes and place boundary lines manually for any purpose that you like. So you can use area schemes not only for calculating leasing calculations for commercial office buildings, but you can use it really for any purpose at all where you need to measure the area of spaces, or portions of your project in some way or fashion - maybe for doing quantity takeoffs or for generating reports, and a custom scheme can help you to do that. As I said they're useful for making all kinds of area calculations. However it is important to understand that areas only work in plan and they only work specifically in area plan, so they're a very special type of plan that you have to create in order to use this tool. So unfortunately we cannot do area schemes that work in elevations or sections for example. They will seem similar to rooms in terms of the area objects themselves. They look very much like rooms and they kind of behave like rooms, but rather than responding to the building geometry as rooms do, they actually conform to those area boundaries that we talked about earlier, which can either be static or dynamic. So they're going to seem similar to rooms but there's some significant differences as well, and also the scope is really different. Rooms are meant to represent each of the individual spaces that you have in a project where a single area might include several rooms. For example it might include an entire tenant space. So hopefully that gives you a high level overview of what to expect from the Area tool set, as we move into the next several videos where we'll begin using each of these tools directly within Revit.