Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Revit Wall Area 'Misunderstanding'

Revit (and by extension Navisworks) wall areas and volumes are calculated based upon the centre of the wall. Because of this, there is no automatic way to get an 'actual' wall face area or volume. There is no way around this that I know of. For instance, I have tried  material schedules, wall wraps and paint tool. The good news is if you know this, you can compensate for it. Also, the bigger your building the less you will be 'off' by percentage.

Questions:

1. Does anyone have a reliable workaround that I have missed?

2. Is anyone using 'Parts' for this?

2. Why does Autodesk insist on leaving it this way? Is there a good reason it is the way it is?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,

Here is a little application macro that I think does what you are looking for:

public void wallArea()
{
UIDocument uidoc = this.ActiveUIDocument;
Document doc = uidoc.Document;
Reference myRef = uidoc.Selection.PickObject(ObjectType.Face);
Element e = doc.GetElement(myRef);
Face face = e.GetGeometryObjectFromReference(myRef) as Face;
TaskDialog.Show("Area",face.Area.ToString());
}

Anonymous said...

It not an answer but these could be of some use in providing you with an solution!

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2009/02/compound-wall-layer-volumes.html

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/wallopeningarea/

Rob @ Arcdox.com

Jeremy Deal said...

In wont schedule wall height either. I thought it would correctly estimate the NET wall area

jazz said...

the 'wall area' that revit gives you on a schedule, doesn't help when you're trying to calculate paint area vs wall sq. meters... there's an add-on on our german version that doesn't subtract openings less that 2.5m2 (like german practice calls for), but even then, the schedules never match what you calculate on your own...

IDmpacheco said...

I have the same question.
I tried using "Parts" (with a small four Wall protect test) to schedule and quantify, and it actually works calculating each layer's area.
But those parts wont join back into a Wall again! So be careful and try to do so as a last step.
But I am not sure thats the right way to do that.
If you guys know another way to quantify each layer's area please let us know !