Material Takeoff Uses

[toddwun]

Hello everyone,

I'm just curious if anyone has used the material takeoff function in 9.0 on an actual project and what your results were, such as ease of use, accuracy, overall benefit, etc.

Thanks!

[aaronrumple]

Hello everyone,

I'm just curious if anyone has used the material takeoff function in 9.0 on an actual project and what your results were, such as ease of use, accuracy, overall benefit, etc.

Thanks!
I progress now. We'll be doing material take off for some of the job and comparing that to traditional take offs as well as the actual quanities used in the project.

[narlee]

Trying to make a schedule that list materials, total quantities and total costs - you know, like a typical spreadsheet or database type view - nothing fancy.

Finding the Dialogue boxes for totaling and for calculated field non-intuitive and that goes for the Help file, which has a dearth of examples. Am I missing something simple?

[jeff.95551]

We use it for major materials for estimating during SD (stucco, drywall, flooring finishes), and to do concrete volumes. It isn't that useful for studwalls because of all the structural variations. The feedback I get from subs is that it's pretty accurate, but they're all so busy that they're probably not checking them very rigorously, if at all. I would guess that they are far more accurate than the manual takeoffs. We aren't including costs, just because we haven't figured out a way to do that yet in a way that works - we do mostly 4 story wood frame, and the labor costs associated with each floor go up as the building does. The structure is getting cheaper as you go up, but they don't even out in a way that makes it easy to figure out an average. One thing that we will probably do in the future to help with our takeoffs is to do separate or stacked walls as you go up, instead of one wall that goes to the roof - it's more work for us, but lets us dial in better costs. As far as I can tell, Revit will tell you the overall surface area of a wall, but it can't break it out by floor, which is what we need to even start putting costs in place.

[narlee]

Thanks, Jeff. That's good info. I currently do my framing a bit differently than most (I actually make each piece and categorize by level and type (wall/floor etc.) for visibility reasons.

I'm going to call Revit for some of the dialogue box help I'm looking for, because I can't even figure out how to do totals and so forth. Then I'll get back to you with some ideas as I develop them.

Thanks again,
Geof Narlee.

[narlee]

DOH!! What a dummy I am - there's a great tutorial that fills in all the blank spots in my BRAIN.

It's better than I imagined - you can click on a schedule item and a drawing opens up with the item highlighted. Bravo, Factory.

But, here's a little hook that you wouldn't normally think to include, but only after I read the tutorial...In the Calculated Dialogue Box, you can't just multiply Area * Cost to get, say "Cost Extension". If you do, you get a rejection notice stating that you've mixed units or inconsistent units or alike. What you need to do is

"Enter Area * Cost /(1'^2) for Formula.
NOTE:The /(1'^2) in the formula is required to make the resulting value unitless; without the value it would have a unit of area."

Who would have thought of that? THAT should have been in the Help File, friends.