topic Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating in Documentation

Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

alexliz — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:58:19 GMT

As per the title, guys: what workflow do you recommend for costing an interior refurb project?

A wall may span different rooms (say hotel, care home, school etc) and each room along the length of the wall may have different interior finish requirements - different paint color, wallpaper instead of paint etc.

How do you tackle this? Do you recommend segmenting the wall into many walls, one each for the various rooms? What happens if the room segmentation occurs at different points along the wall's two faces?

Many thanks for all your great ideas.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Ricardo Lopez — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:20:33 GMT

Hi @alexliz

To quantify with that level of detail directly from the BIM model, as you say, I do think it is advisable to model the finishes separately, as there may be different heights in the same section, and with complex profiles it can sometimes be complicated.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Patrick M — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:14:17 GMT

I'll second ricardo's recommendation. Thats not to say you couldn't get area of plaster/drywall from composites; but there are ALWAYS going to be some fragments added in, maybe in ceiling or floor cavities, that you didn't intend to account for.
If you are trying to get accurate schedules, especially for finishes, model those finishes separately; even if it's just from the stud/structure inward. And be careful at shell/core intersections, that items are modeled precisely and cleanly. Then the wall, slab, roof elements can be scheduled, quantified, labeled and tagged with properties, etc.
...
another sort of hack work-around is to use properties applied to zones. The zone is then just an information dump, not pulling from any actual model content; but this is just a long hand way of producing a more limited version of an excel spread sheet. Most of the residential projects I work on use this method for finish schedules. It is only realyl leveraging area/volume and room name.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

alexliz — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:46:01 GMT

Thank you Ricardo.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

alexliz — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:46:16 GMT

Thank you Patrick.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Patrick M — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:55:27 GMT

my fall back is always to model to as much detail as you need with is as few elements is reasonable. For something like detailed interior quantities, schedules, etc.; that usually means more elements than AC throws at you out of the box.
Case in point, counters and backsplash should not be part of the cabinet elements. faucets should not be part of the sink... in your case, gyp/plaster should not be part of the wall composite

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Ignacio Azpiazu — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:17:34 GMT

Late night, untested idea except for the following: minimal thickness (in sketch, 1/64" deep) Openings, which will not interfere with dimensions to core or face of wall, can be used to produce any design on the wall surface, and their area calculated. “ID contains” criteria, and systematic IDs, can help in scheduling setup too. And they can be on some specific Design Option shown only on certain 3D views and schedules.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Erwin Edel — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:09:25 GMT

For this kind of quantity take-off we generally get things from zones, rather than modelling the finishes. We need our dimensions for construction documentation without the finish, which is also part of the reason for not adding the interior finish to the composite/complex profile.

Zones have height, can be trimmed etc

The Dutch subscription library zone stamps also come standard with option for floor, wall and ceiling finish to be scheduled.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Lpalma — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:18:31 GMT

Hi, For these types of situations, and in relation to multiple finishes on the same wall section, I sometimes use the wall accessory that comes in the Goodies package. I assign defined surfaces to the areas I want to calculate and use an exposed surface area Schedule. I also adjust the exposed surface calculation rules by adding objects elements and linking them to a specific ID in case it's necessary to discard finishes from the walls hosting the accessory. It has its limitations, but it's very useful for walls with linear finishes. If the wall size changes, the accessory updates automatically. A wall can have an accessory on each face, and I can assign an ID to each one to identify them.

I hope this helps.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

alexliz — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:31:25 GMT

Thanks, Erwin.

Zones is how I had started trying to do this, as well. But it kept reporting the wall surface areas wrongly, by quite a bit (not just a little bit). In the end I gave up. See here: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Documentation/Zones-driving-me-insane/m-p/691081/highlight/true#M69552

Barry Kelly suggested using surface schedules instead of zones. While this may work in some instances, I am rather baffled as to why the zones method returns wrong sums - it would be so much simpler if it worked as anticipated. Unless - have I not understood how zones are meant to work?

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

alexliz — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:33:09 GMT

Thanks Ignacio, interesting approach. So, just to clarify: are you using the Opening's surface to calculate finish surface area? Also: does this not result in the 'paint', 'wallpaper' and other 'finishes' on your walls being subtracted from (as opposed to added on top of) your walls' outer surfaces?

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Ignacio Azpiazu — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 01:22:56 GMT

I only got as far as shown in that comment –I was scheduling “opening area”, thinking of just “painting” with openings any finished surface that needs to be scheduled.

For visual purposes only I have used in the past the Niche and Lesene window objects, which only allow rectangular shapes. Niche&Lesene windows, and I assume the same must be true for openings, really complicate the underlying 3D model (because Archicad cuts the full thickness, then fills in the remaining thickness, and I don't remember if there are similar infills above and below the opening). So that is why these “finish openings” should probably go to their own Design Option. Also for not having these openings cluttering everything during non-finish modeling.

I've seen other approaches with room accessories and third party add-ons, but they are based either on zones (which is normally not good enough) or on walls (which requires splitting the wall for each finish change on either side). And manual approaches modeling everything as finish walls, with openings to match doors-windows.

The beauty of openings is they move with the wall. I suspect the area of doors/windows would not be subtracted (and in that case one would need to place the “finish openings” around the door-windows; either several openings, or a single L-U/C-O shaped one), but except for add-ons the other finish modeling options require even worse workarounds for door-windows.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Erwin Edel — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:21:07 GMT

It should work. Here is an overview of all the different parameters that you can add to the schedule:

https://help.graphisoft.com/AC/27/INT/index.htm?rhcsh=1&rhnewwnd=0#t=_AC27_Help%2F060_ElementParameters%2F060_ElementParameters-31.htm&rhsearch=extracted%20wall%20area&rhhlterm=extracted%20wall%20area&rhsyns=%20

Maybe you can cross check with some other parameters like window/door surface, number of wall parts etc to see if everything is picked up correctly.

Sometimes you just need to update the zone for it to behave.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

JeffH — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:22:48 GMT

Modeling wise, if the wall is spanning multiple rooms, or even stories (we model our exterior walls full height, so multi story usually, using detailed complex profiles), if we need to show the random accent wall, our method has been:

place a slab or morph over the wall, and have it overlap minimally (1/64" or less), place it on a different hidden layer.

SEO - subtract it to the wall in question.

And select the toggle to inherit the target surface to inherit from operator.

If there are windows or doors within that portion of wall, it is usually a morph that jogs around the opening, to not change the openings surface appearance.

We don't quantify sq ft or anything like that, This method is just meant for modeling & presentation appearance though.

Re: Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

Lpalma — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:39:17 GMT

Hi...

When I try to extract quantities from zones, I encounter delays with walls located between two zones. Where the area of each face should be associated with each zone, both faces end up associated with the first zone placed, and each walk-around I devise is more tedious than the last. Oddly enough, if I don't need to filter by zones, I use the zone tool.

Could this be the source of the area discrepancy?

I've never tried calculating using zones and with modeled elements attached to the wall faces as finish elements.