ProjX - Make Zone Plans

Okay. In this video, I'm gonna demonstrate how to do a simple HVAC zone plan in Revit. So two things I'm gonna say right off the bat before we get started. One, this is optional. You do not have to do what we're about to do in Revit to deliver your contract deliverables. You can do your zone plan and your takeoffs in Bluebeam just the way you've always been doing. This is a neat way to do things, but if you're if you're still getting your bearings with Revit, this can be a lot. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, free to circle back to this lesson later. But once you do feel confident enough, it can save some time. The other thing is that there is a lot packed in to the infrastructure that we're about to look at.

Spaces and HVAC zones, you can do a lot with them in Revit. We're not gonna explore that yet. That's beyond the scope of this course. That's gonna be a more advanced course that we develop later. So there is a lot of power baked into it. Right now, we're just showing how to make a simple zone plan. And that's the place to start with these to get the hang of them, figure out how they work, get comfortable with them, and then we can do more advanced stuff later. Okay. So let's get started. Let's we're gonna go to our floor zone plan.

And so what we'd like to see is we'd like to see we we like to see rectangle shapes that represent our zones that distinguish them. We'd like labels on them. We wanna see the areas for those zones so that we can communicate with clients, our own team, whatever. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna double click into this view. So I'm now, you know, I'm I'm in the view.

And the first thing I need to do is I need to place spaces. I'm gonna place all the spaces, then I'm gonna assign spaces to the zones, and the zones are gonna be what show up. So if I come up here to the analyze tab and click the space button, Revit's gonna give me a little warning. It's the spaces are not currently visible in this view. And so it would let me place spaces, but they would immediately be hidden.

And so I would like to turn spaces on so that I can see them in this view, but I don't, you know, ultimately, I don't want to see the spaces, I just want to see the HVAC zones. That's why the view template has spaces turned off. So what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna come down to this temporary view properties button, very useful button, gonna click it, I'm gonna say enable temporary view properties. And it puts this little border around to let me know that I'm in this view mode. What that lets me do is I can go into VG, I'm gonna hit VG, and I'm gonna turn spaces on.

I can make any other change to any of these settings that I want, and they will hold only for the duration that I've got temporary view properties on. And when I take this off, it'll revert back to the view template view settings. Very useful button. Okay. So now I'm gonna come back to spaces, and I'm gonna I think that one's already set there.

I must have clicked it previously. So I'm gonna I can come around and place all these settings, but I also wanted to show that I can click the place spaces automatically button, and Revit's pretty good at at creating spaces. Now that's gonna depend on the quality of the space that your architect sends to you, but it's it's typically pretty good. However, the space names, it just this just says space. Right?

And the number is wrong, and I would like it to match the room names that the architect has in their model. And I can quickly do it. There's a button for it, space naming, and just hit okay, And it reads the names from the rooms and it places them over. So that's another handy button. So basically two buttons and I've got all my spaces placed in my project. Okay. Now I want to set my zones. And I just want I'm just gonna go super simple. I'm not gonna get into how you'd really break this up for an HVAC design. I'm just gonna say there's a west zone, a shop zone, and an east zone.

Alright. So I come up here, I click the zone button, and you just come around and select the spaces to add the spaces to the zone that you want. Click click click, and then here I can set the name of the zone, so I'm gonna call this West Zone. Okay. Come up here, do the finish editing zone, and let's do it again.

Select that shop zone and I'm gonna say shop zone, finish editing zone, last zone, and of course, be silly to actually put all these on a real zone, but we're just gonna go with it for now. You don't have to sit through a really long video. Feel free to do a more complicated zone layout if you're following along. Oh, I forgot I forgot to name this one. So I've already created the zone, but I can select this and I can come in here and change the name to East Zone.

Okay. So based on the settings I have in my view template, it's it's already kind of set this border and it's set these colors, it kind of picks automatically. I'm happy with this. I don't need to see the spaces anymore. So I'm gonna come back down here to temporary view properties. I'm gonna say restore view properties. And now what we see is what we get. And I can tag these, so t g for tag mode, and click, click, click. Just arrange these so these look nice, they're not overlapping anything. Here we go.

Okay. So it's got the areas on there and the name of the zone. So I like that. One final thing I can do, I'm gonna right click deactivate view. Now I'm in the sheet. Gonna come over to schedules, mechanical analysis, and I have a set of zone schedules already set. So this is a table with the just the areas. Now again, spaces and zones, there's a lot more you can do with them for analysis. We're not gonna get into that right now. We'll get into that in the future.

But I recommend that you practice with this and get good at doing your zone plans with spaces and zones, and that skill will set you up well for the cool analysis stuff that we will get to in the future. Okay. Final thing, if you don't like the color fills, you wanna come in here, like, let's say you want these to be hatch patterns instead, you do have control over that. It's controlled by the color scheme, which is grayed out because it's set to the view template. You just come to the view template, come down to color scheme, HVAC zones, And so currently they're set to solid fill with a color.

You could change this to let's say like diagonal down, that'll show up really light. I'll just I'll just show you what that would look like. It's hard to see because the color is is this. So if you wanted this, you know, more black and white, you can make it darker, and then that would show up. So if you if you preferred that, if you prefer to crosshatch, you could do that as well. But by default, it'll give you the solid the solid fill color. Okay. So that is it for the HVAC zone plan layout.