In this session, we covered what goes into counting a site’s permeable and impermeable areas.

Topics Covered:

• 00:18    The challenge was to count the permeable and impermeable areas of a site. Our strategy was to start off with the total site area and subtract the impermeable areas to get our permeable area. We could easily determine the site area, because it had the property line around it. We had to make sure that objects denoting impermeable areas were on distinctive classes—our worksheet later would need to find these objects. The property line was on the “None” class, so we moved it to a “Site-Boundary” class. Our driveway was a Roadway piece, so its Object Info palette already showed us how many meters squared it was. We made sure that it was on a distinctive class. Next, we looked at the Hardscape areas. Again, we needed to move these as well. We also created an Impermeable class, with the idea that we could assign polygons to any impermeable areas that didn’t have specific objects that could represent them. Finally, we made a “Site-Building Coverage” class. So, that gave us the classes necessary to calculate the site area, landscape, building coverage, the impermeable, and the permeable.
• 14:02    Before continuing further, we sketched out the concept of what we wanted to achieve. We had a design layer for the site and another for the landscape. On the site design layer, we had the boundary and roads. On the landscape layer, we had a building outline, some hardscape areas, and a pool. Using a range of classes, we wanted to create a report that would find all the different types of objects—the classes would help us find the objects. By using classes, you can tell the worksheet to find the things on the report and to give you the areas. It doesn’t matter what layer the objects are on. Because classes span across layers in Vectorworks, you can just use them to find all the objects.
• 21:59     Next, we made the worksheet. A worksheet can be copied from project to project. However, for the worksheet to work in other projects, you must consistently use the same class names on each project. The first part of our report dealt with the site area. We set up a formula with search criteria that would find the site boundary and report its area. Make sure that the number of objects found by the criteria matches the number of objects that you know are in the file—if you have one site boundary, the criteria should find only one. We continued by setting up areas on our worksheet for Roads, Hardscape, and Decking. Once we had found all the areas, we put in a formula to determine the total area that was impermeable. Remember that when you make the cursor into a “stealth bomber,” it allows you to drag and change the amount of columns and rows. After finishing our worksheet, we dragged and dropped it into the Worksheets folder of our resource library file. That way, we’ll easily find it the next time that we want it! When exporting or printing out a drawing that has a report on it, you can always check the Recalculate worksheets prior to exporting box so that it will have updated figures.

Landscape December 2017 am
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