AutoCAD Advantages: What is Polylining?

This week's article comes to you courtesy of our very own Matt!  Matt is our AutoCAD expert here at RSC.

What is Polylining?

Drawing clean up consists of:

1. Determining accurate locations of physical objects
2. Reconciling the drawings to CAD standards (using proper layers, naming conventions, and blocks)

Someone must walk the floors, taking measurements and accounting for the space.  They will then provide a fairly accurate representation of each floor of the building.  They will indicate where walls, windows, doors, stairs, offices and desks are located.  Their completed drawing will look something like this:

 Polylining consists of:

1. Creating representations of physical objects (usually polyline shapes) in the drawing.  In this case, it will be the physical area occupied by each room, using BOMA standards.
2. Connecting those drawing objects to the database, by providing a primary key (or unique identifier) that specifies that particular room.
3. Adding additional information to each room object in the database so that properties of the space can be tracked.  We add room types, categories and standards, so that the database can run reports on how much space is occupied by services (Primary Circulation and Mechanical Rooms, for instance.)

Polylining basically starts with a drawing that is essentially a collection of colors and shapes and adds a layer of information on top of it.  This information can be mined for interesting relationships and reports.

Here is an image of a shaded floorplan indicating all the room types on this floor.  The polylines are the boundaries of the individually shaded rooms.

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