Fills for Space Planning

The Fill tool is useful for more than just masking drawings. Fills can have ID’s and can be used to measure areas.

It’s quite common in practice to use Fill’s placed on hidden layers to schedule the Gross Floor Area and Open Space of a design. The Fill used to measure the GFA would have an ID of GFA. Site Area can also be measured in a similar way.

For rooms which require a specific area, it’s possible to draw a fill with that area first as a basic rectangle and then use the “Offset Edge – Fixed Area” to redefine the shape.

The area of the fill will remain the same, but the dimensions of the rectangle will change.

If you have a series of rooms which require specific areas, then they could be planned out initially as fills and then joined to form a rudimentary sketch plan for massing and study.