refers to the process of quantifying and listing the materials, quantities, and dimensions needed for a construction or design project. It involves identifying and calculating the amounts of various materials, such as concrete, wood, steel, glass, etc., required to complete a project. Material take-offs are crucial for cost estimation, project planning, procurement, and scheduling.
Should I download Visual ARQ or something like that?
I would sort everything by material or item you want to quantify, then take counts and areas from the items. there is definitely a better way, I don’t know if VisualARQ will help with quantities though.
It really depends what you’re doing. Your question covers quite a wide scope. If you’re able to model something accurately, whether a landscape, some small piece of furniture, or whatever else, you can extract quantities, surface areas, stuff like that pretty easily.
I’ve seen what expensive estimating apps do. Some are complete garbage while others are pretty good but very costly. For what I do (concrete buildings) I can estimate quantities and areas faster than with any app (kind of… there’s a bit more to it. I have to build the 3D model anyways). With my 3D model I can get far more accurate concrete volumes compared to 98% of Revit models. Plus anything else I need such as areas for finishing. Checking quantities isn’t automated but it’s very versatile and you can choose from almost any unit.
I took an earthworks estimating course a while back. They had us doing certain hand calculations. I decided to see if Rhino was good at estimating earthworks… at first some of my numbers were WAY off… I spent hours trying to figure out what I did wrong and even did several tests to validate the results I was getting in Rhino. Eventually I finally realized it wasn’t me or Rhino: the methods they were teaching us were the problem - in certain situations they simply didn’t work… Quantities could be off over 50% using these methods. I lost interest in the course (which was over half the cost of Rhino’s perpetual license). I’m sure there are programs that do all this stuff better than Rhino… but it absolutely could work for that purpose.
One thing to remember is that you have to either model the project, or get it into Rhino somehow… If you’re just calculating something like floor areas… BlueBeam gives you the most bang for your buck (it works but it’s so boring!).