ACA in BIG urban design - pushing spaces objects to the limit.

[Helsinki_Dave]

Hi,

I've gone full circle and am back at ACA - having gone via Revit and ArchiCAD, to try a find a BIM urban design solution.

What we need to create a city of five thousand people on CAD, but it needs to an intelligent model - kind of BIM but bigger.

So buildings (residential, commercial, industrial etc) are quickly placed within zones on a city landscape (which is flat, for simplicity - hurray!)

The buildings need to be easy to manipulate (ie push pull) so are probably made of either masses or spaces in ACA. The urban zones that the buildings sit in are probably ACA spaces.

In order to get data such as Gross Floor Area, Building Footprint Area, Building Height, Number of Floors, Percentage of Zone containing Buildings etc etc (the terminology is simplified here) , it seems we have to go to excel. In ACA, we can't see how you can take a space, and get it to tell what is sitting inside it. However, its quite easy to take a building and get it tell you in what space it's located - which is a pity.

Creating tags to label the buildings and zones also sadly seems to become manual. The multi-view block on a zone (ACA space) cannot report back for example the percentage of a lot that is residential or commercial, or even the percentage of a zone area that has been used by objects inside that zone.

If you missed all that, then the challenge is find a way make a space object acknowledge what is inside it and then report that in a tag attached to it. This can be done manually in excel, but it involves lots of manual typing and allows for errors, especially in a city sized model.

If anyone has seen anything like that here and abouts, let us know!

There is software like this but it's still in BETA, such as Modelur, a plugin for Sketchup.

Many thanks.

[wbeard]

If I understand you correctly I think you could just make custom property set definitions and apply them to a space and you could tag/schedule that information. Classification definitions come in handy for filtering scheduled items.

[Helsinki_Dave]

Thanks for the reply, it gets a bit stuck since there is no property set that tells you what is actually inside a space - or even more favourably - the sum of a certain space styles within a space zone as a percentage of the zone area.

I posted also to the Autodesk forum, they gave it a good thrashing.

http://discussion.autodesk.com/forum...hreadID=744453