SD masses, area of mass faces

[petervanko]

I am massing out a masterplan and am wanting to query mass faces for their areas (to be imported into an energy compliance software). Any existing tutorials or locations in the help files? I have also searched this forum thoroughly and can't find a thing. What is everyone else doing...setting up some parameter? TIA...

[petervanko]

Nothing better than replying to your own posts...LOL.

Ok, as soon as you apply walls and roofs to them, you can schedule the areas. This, of course, just helps the model progress, anyway!

Otherwise, I do not believe you can query a mass face and extrapolate the area.

[Steve_Stafford]

By mass face are you asking for the floor plate of the mass or the faces of the exterior "walls" etc.?

For floors you can define Floor Surface Areas for each Mass element based on relevant levels. Then you query the Gross Floor Area for each mass. If you want individual floor plate values add a floor by face to each Floor Area Face. If you just want the floor plate at grade, only define a Floor Area Face for the level at grade, ignoring the others. The mass will only report the Gross Floor Area accordingly.

In general mass elements will report Gross Surface Area, Gross Volume and Gross Floor Area (assuming Floor Area Faces are defined)

[petervanko]

If you have a cube 50'x50'x50', I am looking for the ability to query one of the 50'x50' faces and get "2500 SF". I have found a better way, though: by applying a generic wall to one of those faces, I can easily achieve the same thing, and then schedule it. See, I am using DOE's COMCheck and need to separate all of the walls facing north, south, east and west. I made a wall type for each cardinal direction, applied them to their respective mass face, and then have scheduled them--much easier than even going through and querying each mass face and manually entering it into Excel. I get 4 numbers at the end for 50 acres of buildings...voila.

Thanks for the tip regarding floor area surfaces! Too bad we can only get gross surface area...