Bengaluru, India
Several Engineering & Architectural design workflows have space planning as one of their tasks. Whether it is an architect trying to figure out how many floor or wall tiles can fit into a space or a fabricator trying to work out the optimum number of aluminium panels to cover the area or a construction professional trying to quantify the number and sizes of form-work panels required, the common denominator is the same: count, nest or fit rectangular (or other) shapes to cover a space, and optimize the combinations.
In CADPower, we have a bunch of tools for this purpose: general as well as specific task oriented productivity tools for designers.
Let us begin the space planning discussion by taking a simple architectural scenario where you have a room plan: a footprint polyline representing the wall corners.
First, we use the CP_BUILDWALLS (CADPower -> BOM/BOQ Tools -> Draw Developed Walls from plan footprint) command to generate the elevations of the walls that comprise the room. The elevations are simple closed polylines and are generated in true units scale from the footprint polyline. For normal parallel walls, these are simple rectangular closed polylines. If there are special shapes like a sloping roof edge or some arc segments, these must be added manually by editing the closed elevation polyline.
CP_BUILDWALLS - Main Dialog box
The walls are numbered both in plan as well as in elevation for easy cross-reference. It is also possible to name the footprint polyline as per the floor level and also add a suffix so that walls from multiple rooms can be easily identified as the project becomes complex: multiple-rooms and multiple-floors. Under Settings, it is also possible to have the ability to have separate linear units for your plan footprint and your wall elevations.
An illustration of how the plan footprint is now laid out as elevation of each wall, with complete identification and numbering
Placing panels / formwork / tiles example: The next step is to lay out the rectangular formwork panels so that they cover the entire wall. In this case, we have taken the example of wall FF1-LIV, which is my description for the First Floor Living Room Wall # 1.
Using a combination of tools like CP_TILEPLACE, CP_TILEOFFSET, CP_TILEEDIT and CP_SCLEDIT, we can fill the wall area exactly, to dimension, with with standard as well as custom sized panels.
The CP_TILEPLACE command (CADPower -> BOM/BOQ Tools -> Place tiles / XY sized panels) is used to place a rectangular element (tile or slab or formwork or any panel) to fill an available space (the Fill Polygon option) or at picked locations (free-form panel placing). You can specify the gaps in X and Y between the rectangular elements and specify the rounding off values in the X and Y directions. This ensures that, when you do free-form picking of corners and lay the tiles, they are rounded off to a nearest specified value.
The CP_TILEPLACE dialog box
You can also have fine control on how the size and description must appear. Internally, the CP_TILEPLACE command uses a simple block to represent the rectangular tile. The block has two attributes - SIZE and DESCription. You can create your own block as well but you must ensure that it is of unit size (1x1) definition and must have its insertion point at the lower left corner of the square.
When you cover an area with the CP_TILEPLACE - Fill a polygon option, there will be some areas that need to be fixed, in order to have a perfectly matching geometry.
This editing can be done with the CP_SCLEDIT ( CADPower -> Blocks -> Block-related -> Interactive XY Scale Editor) command.
This is an interactive block scale factor editor where you can chose to edit the X or Y scale factors interactively in specified increments, either increasing or decreasing values. By this method, you can precisely size a block at an exact dimension that is needed to fill the available space.
Once this is done for a single block, it is often required to apply the same dimensional update to a set of blocks in the same row (or column). This can be easily done using the CP_TILEEDIT (CADPower -> BOM/BOQ Tools -> Edit tiles / XY sized panels) command. This tool is also available in the Block Tools section.
After using CP_TILEEDIT command, you can transform the above automated panel layout arrangement into a custom-measured and dimensioned format like the one below. The CP_TILEEDIT command allows you to pick a single panel block and (optionally) adjust its size. You are then prompted if there are more panels in the same row (or column) that need to be edited to the same size values. You can switch between row and column directions using the S (Swap) option which is within the command in a sub-option.
And finally, the last step is to create a quantity table out of what we have designed. You can do that using the CP_TILECOUNT command, which is a variant of the CP_BOQ (CADPower -> BOM/BOQ Tools -> Create Bill of Materials/Quantities) command with the 'Count Scale Factors' option chosen as default.
The CP_TILECOUNT command generates quantities using the Block Scale Factor of the block as the key defining measurement
The quantity calculation is tabled in a format as shown below:
The SIZE-QUANTITY-DESCRIPTION-COST-AREA-VOLUME table (fully customizable and parametric)
This is just a simple workflow demonstrated. You can add more complexities to the quantity calculation. The tiles themselves can be specified as a 3D element. This means that you have a third dimension (depth), in addition to length and breadth. The depth dimension transforms your panel into a 3d element, like a brick, or hollow composite block. The third dimension allows the possibility to compute weight and volume measurements also. There is also an option to attach additional resources to the tile. These may mean the amount of cement, glue, time or other resource require to place one tile. All of these will be taken into the computation and multiplied by the total number to arrive at the complete and comprehensive table of quantities.
The CP_TILECOUNT command is very customizable. All parameters are stored in INI files which make it easy for repeated retrieval and re-use by other members of the team.
If you have difficulties understanding how to use the space planning and quantity computation tools in CADPower, simply let us know and we will be glad to assist you.
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Key Contacts: rakesh.rao(at)thedesignsense.com / +91-9243438300 / +91-8073279755
Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/rakesh_
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