Custom Space Planning Feature Request, a prelim to HLM

[mthd]

Hi to all, I wonder if it would be possible to implement a function to have a Custom Space Planning Feature to speed our design modeling workflow ? 

Currently in our region we have this article to help with a method for initial space planning from our GS partner in Australia & NZ. This methods involves using fills.

https://centralinnovation.com/technical-resources/tips-and-tricks/fills-for-space-planning/

While HLM and DO’s “Design Options” are great for this process I definitely think we could go back one more step before Hot Link Models, that is a Custom Space Planning Feature. Where room modules are not set like they are for repetitive work in residential units for example.

I wonder if it would be possible to place a Zone Stamp without having a defined polyline perimeter and then be able to magic wand the walls around the zone edges ? Of course the zones could form a bubble like plan for where rooms can be placed in the desired combinations. 

At present we can do something similar to this but with the use of fills as shown in the link above.

The only problem we run into at present with this method and with a proposed method above is that we do get overlapping walls when we use the magic wand to produce walls automatically around the fill or polyline. 

Would there be a way to have the magic wand settings adjusted when producing walls to ignore any walls that might be produced twice by the method above ? That way we would avoid having to delete doubles of walls that we do not need to be produced a second time. This becomes a problem when you have two rooms right next to each other, either defined by a fill or polyline and you want to wand walls around those entities. I can ungroup a polyline and delete the line that joins the two rooms and wand the new walls accordingly. There is however quite a bit of tidying up to do with the walls so that they do indeed join, intersect and butt correctly.

What do others think, will this speed up our workflow when designing custom homes with a more intelligent zone tool that can have walls placed around it in a logical manner with no overlapping ?

[Marc H]

Hi mthd,

For my purely space planning work, I rely on Zones. IMHO, while sometimes tedious and fickle, they are more robust than fills for this type of work.  The Zone tool certainly could use a lot of improvement, but combined with the Property Manager and the newer associative labels, I am able to put together my option packages.  I'm looking to explore the Design Option tool (now that I found it under the Document menu rather than the Design menu in v27 TP), I expect I'll have a nimbler toolkit.

In reading your post, it appears you are also looking to convert the space planning 'bubbles' into building designs. I'm probably not adding much to your toolkit here, but perhaps it has some helpful information: In a project some years back, I can tell you the approach worked out very well.  I was given a few typologies to overlay on a large number of existing sites to assess how feasible those typologies were for each site.  Again, I used zones.  I created a PLN for each site because each site was in a different town and each had an existing building associated with it.  I then linked two HLMs into each site file. One had the preferred typology to be adopted. The other HLM was a zone 'palette' of a half dozen space types that I could pull from (i.e., syringe).  The typology module included the appropriate walls and zones.  I was then able to place the appropriate typology in an optimum manner, but then could make custom allocations either in lieu of, or in addition to the base proposal using the palette zones.  One added benefit of this setup was uniform data across all the sites, from which I was able to aggregate results and provide some insight back to the client.

With that, I think a Zone tool that is as robust as, say the Curtainwall tool, could be of great help here.  You could feed in the interior and exterior wall types criteria you want in between and at perimeter zones, and it would create the basic floor plan from a custom assembly of zones (where a pre-design module is infeasible), and make it ready for further editing.