Planning buildings
Space planning
The Vectorworks Design Suite products perform space planning and programming studies (Vectorworks Architect required), and create schematic floor plans.
The Space tool is not included in the Vectorworks Landmark and Spotlight workspaces, but it can be added (see Customizing workspaces).
These features can be combined in various ways depending on your preferred workflow:
To begin the design process, draw the spaces. Reposition and reshape the spaces to develop a schematic floor plan. Then create the walls automatically from those spaces.
Begin with a solid model, and then create the exterior walls from the model.
Create the walls first, and then create the space objects automatically to determine the areas enclosed by the walls.
Using space programming, import an adjacency matrix that was provided by a client, and automatically create a bubble diagram and a stacking diagram. Reshape and reposition the space objects in the bubble diagram to create a floor plan, and then create the walls automatically from the spaces.
Create the initial schematic design with polylines instead of spaces, and then convert the polylines to spaces.
Create the model with stories (Vectorworks Architect required), and associate the net/gross volume of the spaces along with the stories.
Use the Space tool to create a schematic floor plan. To track room finish data on a schedule, add finish information to the spaces. If necessary, IFC data (including extended space properties used by the General Services Administration) can be attached to the spaces. With Vectorworks Architect, the net and gross volume of a space can be associated with story elevation, so that as story layer levels change, the space volume adjusts accordingly. As elements of the spaces are changed, including through an interactive BIM workflow or changes to external databases, use the Update Spaces command to keep the drawing information current (see Updating spaces).
Creating a space style allows you to set fixed values for some of the parameters for all instances that use the style, while maintaining the ability to edit other parameters for each instance of the space (see Concept: Plug-in object styles). Once a space style is created, you can select it from the Resource Selector on the Tool bar or the Space Settings dialog box (see Space settings).
Use space styles to more easily manage the planning and design process. In early planning phases, a style might define only usage type/classification and color. Additional parameters, such as room name, IFC information, and boundary definitions can be defined by the style as the design progresses, while other parameters such as room size can be set by instance for flexibility. By completion, space styles can be used to manage room finish requirements and help estimate project costs. Share space styles with colleagues for consistency.
Spaces and walls interact in Vectorworks. You can create walls from existing space objects; alternatively, if walls or polylines that represent spaces already exist in the drawing, use space planning commands to create spaces from the walls or polylines.
The visibility of walls can affect the spaces, depending on the situation and action:
When creating spaces, only visible walls are taken into account.
When updating existing spaces (using the Update Spaces command or clicking Update Boundary from the Object Info palette), only visible walls are taken into account.
When existing spaces are regenerated, for example due to changed space labels, a new height value, or moved walls, wall visibility has no effect on automatically bounded spaces, because the spaces are already associated with the walls.
See Editing space boundaries for more information.
