How about the possibility to let Speckle convert the area bounding lines into a surface or volume with a small height for visualization?
I’d also like access to Revit areas / area schemes in Speckle. A buildings gross and net area are important metrics in all projects (and are handled by area schemes in Revit), so it would be great to have them in Speckle too.
You can export the area schemes to IFC from Revit and they appear as volumes (with some standard room height). Maybe the Speckle team can look on Github how the IFC exporter exports the areas? (I tried going through the IFC exporter code myself, but it was too complicated for me 
)
1 Like
Hey @here
Can you guys expand why you need this feature? If you can explain your use case, it would help us prioritize the issue.
I use areas to generate IfcSpaces and these can be used for various puposes, mostly as volume containers representing different area definitions. The reason I use areas instead of rooms or spaces is that Revit does not allow various overlapping rooms. Preferable I do not want to use IFC but Speckle and therefore I need some volume representation of these areas or boundaries.
2 Likes
Also, for thermal simulations, it is useful to have volumes that represent internal mass of the buildings and areas are quite easy to set up for this purpose.
1 Like
Hey @MaxT ,
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain your use case – it definitely helps us understand what you’re trying to accomplish.
I looked into this to see what’s possible, and I wanted to give you some context on the challenges we’re facing with converting Revit Areas into volumetric objects.
The main issue is that Area elements in the Revit API are stored as 2D boundary-based objects rather than 3D volumetric elements. This creates a couple of tricky situations for us:
Height determination: Since Areas don’t have a height property, we’d need to decide on a height value ourselves. Adding a default height might work for your specific workflow, but it could be problematic for others who need different heights or use Areas in different ways. We try to avoid building features that are too tailored to individual use cases, as it makes the tool harder to use and maintain for everyone.
Geometry generation: The volumetric geometry doesn’t exist in the Revit API, which means we’d need to generate it from scratch. This is something we’re cautious about because our philosophy is to extract and faithfully represent the data that already exists in the host application, rather than creating new interpreted geometry. Building this would require significant development effort and would be a departure from how we typically handle data.
Boundary topology: Areas in Revit can have open boundaries – meaning they’re not always closed polygons. This would create significant challenges when trying to generate a 3D mesh, as we’d need to handle cases where the boundary isn’t properly closed, which could lead to invalid or unexpected geometry.
That said, your use case sounds legitimate and potentially valuable. I’d like to get some more perspectives on this, especially as we’re thinking about broader applications.
@jonathon - would love your thoughts on this, particularly whether volumetric Area representations could be useful for Speckle Intelligence we’re building.
1 Like
For height determination, could you create some sort of UX that lets the user choose from some list of possible height value options (e.g., floor to ceiling leveraging levels, uncapped height, etc)? Even with that, generating a volume from a polygon is no joke (as we’ve learned ourselves).
If you all decide to start developing this and implement floor to ceiling as bounding height option for users, happy to collaborate on how we implemented that.