Architect Special Interest Group February 2017 (am)

In this session we wanted to look at scheduling and  worksheets and how they could be connected to spaces to create a report. The report might want to list the areas and room names, but it could also be more sophisticated and report other requirements such as occupancy loading, number of power socket, etc.

Topics Covered:

• 00:18    we start this topic by looking at a conceptual plan showing a series of spaces that can be used to create a report. When you create spaces you have the ability to give the spaces a specific class (which could control the colour) they also have occupancy and room names. Spaces are an easy way to create a three-dimensional conceptual plan and have information attached to them. Once you have a space it’s easy to create a report showing each space number what kind spaces what its area as and what the required area should have been.
• 01:13    another way to create a report is to use a series of polygons. Each polygon is assigned to a different class. Then create a report the look for all these polygons groups them together by the class and then analyses the occupancy of the building.
• 02:06    when you calculate areas, it is important to make sure you have the correct area units. Even if you are using metric dimensions, you can set the area units to be imperial. I had experience with many clients who could only understand imperial areas although they were quite happy to use metric dimensions.
• 02:39   when setting up spaces is useful to use stories even of the building only has one story. Stories can be used to control the volume of the spaces. So the first thing we do is to create a file with a single story and only use the required levels.
• 03:52   now we can create our spaces. It is easy to create spaces from a polygon or a rectangle. Vectorworks has a command Create Objects from Shapes… Which will create many types of objects from the simple shape. Therefore it is often easy to draw your shape using the rectangle or circle tools (along with add surface and clip surface) and then creating them into space. The space object has many settings. It is important to go through the settings to ensure that your spaces will be fitted to the right levels of your stories, that the required information is attached (and there are several options for this). If you create your first space using the required settings and information, it will make it easy for all the subsequent spaces to be created the same.
• 17:13    subsequent spaces can now be created using the same settings. You might only need to change the room name or the class depending on your reporting. At the end of this part of the session we went through the classes to ensure that the classes were controlling the graphic style of the spaces.
• 33:17    now that we have several spaces we can create a report. There are some automated space reports in Vectorworks, but in this session we want to look at creating our own specific report. Using the command from the Tools menu we can create a report that has just the fields that we require. Once the reporters created it can be formatted to suit, the headings can be changed to make them appropriate, and some fields on space objects work both ways between the report and the space (but not all). We even created a field to know whether the occupants of the spaces had paid their rent.
• 41:41    some fields in the report have been placed as text and some fields have been placed as numbers. The tell-tale is the database header. If the database header shows account of the number of net areas, then the field is displaying information as text, not as a number. This will make it impossible to calculate the total area because you cannot add text objects together. We did look at how we can convert these text objects into number objects and then create a total area for the entire project.
• 52:43    once you have put all this effort into creating a space report, you can use the Resource Manager to copy it from one file to another. When you copy this report into another file it will automatically update based on the spaces that it finds in the new file. If this was something you did on a regular basis, then you could certainly add this worksheet to your template file so that was available and every project.
• 57:20    for more information on worksheets have a look at the manual 0907 Intermediate Worksheets

Architect February 2017 am
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