Working w/ the Zone Tool

[Robert Fuchs]

We are doing a Master Plan for a local Community College.
I am putting every building in 3D along with the site.
I am trying to use the zones to calculate the total of each category of each building.
The color codes (category) are as follows. Heath Professions, Communication and Arts..and so on. Each category will have its own name
and color code. The problem i am having is trying to set up the calculation
report to where i can have a subtotal of each category. All i get is the
sq. ft. of each room along with the total of all the spaces. I need to have
the building color coded with a color code key out to the side that shows
the color of the category and the total sq. ft. i am trying to find the
best way to do this. Does anyone have an idea on how i can go about this? I have gone through the manuals but they didn't help much.
I am on a dual G5 2.0, OS X 10.3.4, AC 8.1

[Anonymous]

Sorry, I don't know any convenient answers.

I need a coloured zone key for my project. I have tried exploding a zone fill and get a coloured fill drawn supposedly with pen 255, except the fill is not the colour of pen 255 but rather the same colour as the zone. However when you do this with more than one zone the fill colours default to one single zone colour.

Obviously you can check the colour RGB definition of the zone and set a pen to the same colour, but this is hardly a 'Building Information Model' approach.

The work around I have used is to place zones on the plan and set it's ID to KEY, turning off the Zone name, area etc. I have then filtered out Zones with an ID of KEY in the interactive scheduler. I tried filtering out Zones with a zero height, but I couldn't get this to work.

[Robert Fuchs]

I will give that a try then. It would be nice to have an interactive schedule
for the zone tool so you could copy and paste it in the Legend or a report
to AC. Till then i gues i will keep looking for other ways to do what i need.
Thanks for you help.

[Anonymous]

Andy wrote:
Obviously you can check the colour RGB definition of the zone and set a pen to the same colour, but this is hardly a 'Building Information Model' approach.

You may consider this a workaround until we have RGB fills in ArchiCAD, but I find it to be a perfectly reasonable way of working. I set up my templates with 15 zone categories and match their colors to pens 241 through 255. I did this because zone colors only print if fills are set to bitmaps unless there are matching pen colors. (At least this was true of AC7/PM2. I haven't tested it in AC8/PM3.)