Workflow recommendations for painting/decorating

[alexliz]

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.

[Ricardo Lopez]

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.

[Patrick M]

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.

[alexliz]

Thank you Ricardo.

[alexliz]

Thank you Patrick.

[Patrick M]

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

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

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. 

[Erwin Edel]

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.

[Lpalma]

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.

 

 

 

[alexliz]

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#...

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?