siding material takeoffs

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have experience in using the cadimage coverings tool to create building siding and calculating material quantities from that? I'd like to be able to somehow come up with a total quantity in square feet of wall for each kind of siding material.

Thanks in advance for your help!

mjkoarch

[Steve Jepson]

You can do that with the interactive ArchiCAD schedule, and in sqft.
What would be nice is to have that list in the number of 12 or 16' lenghts you need to order. There is a way to do that in ArchiCAD too. Depending on your material, you might even want your schedule to display bundles, or some other unit. You can save your ArchiCAD schedules as Excel files and tweak them as needed if that helps.

[Anonymous]

Here is what I have made it to with the schedules. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find where the parameter is that calls out the sqft. for the object. I notice that you can see the calculated sqft. in the object selection settings dialog, but how do you get those to show in the schedule? Particularly, so that I can use the "show uniform items as a single entry" option and sum up the totals.

How did you get this to work?
Thanks!
mjkoarch

[Anonymous]

Does anyone out there know how to get the calculated siding square footage parameter (circled in image) from the cadimage siding tool and make it a schedule field in the interactive schedules?

Thanks in advance.
mjkoarch

[Anonymous]

I would do a take off from the wall and not the covering. Now I have had a play I would not trust the object to calculate properly. If you say draw a wall 2m high and 2.5m long and add the cadimage covering it calculates out at 5m² but say you extend that covering another 2.5m past the end of the wall and got back to its properties it still says 5m², not 10m² which would make me think the covering just calculates the wall surface its attached to.

[Anonymous]

If you say draw a wall 2m high and 2.5m long and add the cadimage covering it calculates out at 5m² but say you extend that covering another 2.5m past the end of the wall and got back to its properties it still says 5m², not 10m² which would make me think the covering just calculates the wall surface its attached to.

I checked into this and found out that you're right. However, by adjusting the covering vertically with a custom bottom of wall, etc. it actually does update the s.f. Cadimage needs to work this out for sure. However, this calculation does take into account windows subtractions, etc. and I would still like to be able to summarize the areas.

Does anyone know how to take this calculated area from this object tool and extract it to the objects interactive schedule? I tried going to the additional parameters part of the schedule and choosing the cadimage coverings tool, but none of the options were for this calculation.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!