Areas and Hatches

Hello all,

Hope you are all well!

I have a simple problem, but it seems to be a complex one in autocad, so I have come to the conclusion its just how I am approaching it.

I am working on a very large interior fit out project, with a total of 20 floors. Throughout the building there are generic functions happening, like open plan office space, cellular office space, meeting rooms etc.

Currently I have a GA drawing with all the floors offset from each other in a vertical stack, with a set distance. On each floor I have given certain areas with certain functions a specific hatch. So that open plan office space on every floor has the same hatch, in this case a solid fill colour.

This works well at the moment as it add a diagramatic element to the plans which makes it very accessible to the client during design development.

Because the building is so huge, a large part of the design development it juggling areas of certain functions, so that for example we get the correct ratio of the number of people to the number of meeting rooms.

So there is the context, now for the problem.

Up to this point I have been count the areas for each floor, for each function manually, which is not fast but it works... The problem is this slows down the number of interations, and has made this part of the process a bottleneck.

My dream would be to have and attribute for each hatch, the same as I have for each desk in the building (each desk has what floor is it on, desk type etc.. hence I dont need to count desks).

Then I could do a EATTEXT and collect the area information for each hatch into a table and never add the areas up for each function again. I could use the attribute assigned to the hatch to determine the floor it is on, and the layer to determine the function..

The catch is hatches are not blocks, ... no attributes, so, the only solution I could think of would be a layer for each function for each floor, so eg a layer called _AREA-OPEN-OFFICE-FLOOR-2, then for the next floor _AREA-OPEN-OFFICE-FLOOR-3 and so on but this is going to create a layer bonaza so I am keen to avoid this.

So ideas please, because for me I think this kind of problem must be quite common and must have a reasonable tried and test workflow.

Just as a side note, I have 20 floors, about 15 fuctions, the shape of the hatch can change quite alot so making a block of a hatch with an attribute would require problably a 25 control point hatch, maybe this is a another solution who knows..

I will say a thousand thank you's to the JEDI who kills this beast for me.

You could add the hatch information directly into a table:

http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2010/02/displaying-the-hatch-area-with-a-field-in-autocad.html

yeap I looked at this blog, and I think its a possible solution but it still requires me to add a feild to each area, then link that to a cell etc..

It still seems slightly strange I think I prefer creating a very flexible block of a hatch with many control points, and then having an attribute for the area and another for the floor.

I am very suprised autocad doesnt seem to have a wizard, for this kind of behaviour, perhaps I will move the drawing over to Rhinoceros, that way I can deal with more layers, as it allows nesting. Then use layer to control what to measure.

Here are some more ideas:

The dataextraction wizard in 2010 will pick up information from all objects - not just blocks, so you can get the hatch information directly.

You can add attributes directly into a DWG - they don't have to be inside a block. You could try an attribute reading a value of a hatch using a field.

You can use the express tools to add X-Data to an object - I'm not sure if this if picked up with data-extraction.

How about using a hatch inside a block and using X-clip to clip it back to the shape of your room? - I'm not sure how you would get the area information out of this... You might have to cheat a bit, maybe by copying a polyline that is the shape of the room into the block and reading the area information from that.

You could get someone to custom code it...

or You could buy Architectural desktop...

http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2010/ENU/AutoCAD%202010%20User%20Documentation/index.html?url=WS1a9193826455f5ff1c7e22710db287822c-7fb8.htm,topicNumber=d0e217632

So you want an attributed block with dynamic area label for each hatch object?