Increase Your Estimating Productivity by 25% with Autodesk Takeoff

EDWIN BAILEY: Hey, everybody. Thanks for your interest in being able to increase your estimating productivity by at least 25% with the Autodesk Takeoff solution. My name is Edwin Bailey. I am with Skanska. I've been with Skanska for about seven, eight years now. My background is in architectural technology and design, but I've been on the construction side for a number of years now. I'll let Joe introduce himself.

JOE GAITHER: Hello, everybody. My name is Joe Gaither. I'm a pre-construction specialist here at Autodesk, and I've been working very closely with Edwin as Skanska has been evaluating and rolling out Autodesk Takeoff. So we're definitely excited to present today on the efficiencies that we can gain with Autodesk Takeoff.

And just quickly wanted to flash our safe harbor statement here, just protecting us. You're going to see a lot of these throughout all the presentations here at AU, so just flashing this here before we get into things.

EDWIN BAILEY: OK, so just a brief review of the learning objectives. Obviously you guys are here to learn a little bit about the Takeoff solution. We're going to focus on how it's a centralized 2D and 3D Takeoff platform, how you can build trust in the models, how you can benefit from formulas and reduce dependency on Excel to finish your estimating.

Also going to go over some best practices and techniques that we've learned, at least from the Skanska perspective, and then just dive into some demos and some examples and things like that.

I will say that we had quite a few people that were very interested in this platform, and so we had about 50 people sign up to test out the solution here within the US. And just like with everything, you have those that are there to just kick the tires a little bit, and then some really good early adopters. And so we saw a good example of quite a few different projects. And just for those that aren't familiar with Skanska, we are a global construction company. We do some development, and some civil as well, and we work on some pretty fun, cool projects. And so you kind of see a little bit of some of the work that we did within the tool.

So as we mentioned, there are some 2D and 3D tools, and you have the option to go in and do your more traditional 2D Takeoff and build out some quantities from the drawings as well as the models, and just being able to slice and dice the model, enhance your Takeoff with the BIM information.

So this is a really good platform in the fact that it combines both of those. And we definitely put it through its paces. We put Joe through the wringer, going through and working with us and helping us bring this in and then really test it out to its fullest. So wanted to say thanks to Joe, and just kind of showcase a little bit of what we did here and share some of our best practices throughout this rest of the presentation.

Quick overview. So when you're first getting started, I will say that the online video tutorials that Autodesk has produced are a great resource for getting started. It doesn't have everything, but that's why we got AU, right? So take those lessons and then some of the stuff that we're going to share today, and I think that will really fill in some of the gaps there. But some good content there for everybody.

So, to start off, I just want to talk about just-- there's two main workflows within the platform. And so those that are familiar with Autodesk Construction Cloud, it is all in the cloud, obviously, but there's different modules. And so within the Takeoff platform, you can work within that single module or you can go in and enhance it with some other stuff that I'll show you here in just a second. And so you can upload your Sheets and your PDFs directly within the Sheets and Models tab within Takeoff, and then that allows you to create packages to generate your inventories through your Takeoff types, and then from there you can kind of go in and export out to Excel through API. And we'll talk a little bit about the EC3 as well.

So if you want to enhance that workflow, then you can actually upload your PDFs and your models to docs first and then publish them into Takeoff. And so what this allows you to do is take advantage of more of the cloud platform. And so one of those features is that you're able to bridge files over from external accounts. So we do this with our 3D models from the design team, and we can push those models directly into to the docs platform and then publish them to Takeoff.

We kind of do a little bit of a hybrid approach. Most people, they'll upload the PDFs directly to the Takeoff solution and then do them there. But if you publish them here first, then you also have the option of doing PDF markups. And another thing that I like to do is use the model coordination module for clash detection because you've already got those files within the platform. And so I'll kind of show that a little bit later.

And so just a great-- something that's definitely not within those video tutorials, just how to access some of this additional features and functionality in the platform.

I will say that when you're first starting off, there's a great start up wizard. It's going to ask you, hey, what's your measurement system, imperial metric? Obviously you're going to know what that is. Classifications-- we end up using uniformat and masterformat quite a bit, and the one thing that we found is that want to be consistent in which one you have set up first, that way when you go and you have your different takeoff types, you can then share them between project to project. So that's important to get set up and utilize that consistency as you go, OK?

Another thing that you'll want to do is set these up within a template. And so we have a basic kind of like folder structure that we use within docs, and then we'll go in and we'll add these classification systems and what our standard measurement system is.

The other thing is-- that way when you go to start every project, you don't have to upload those classification systems every single time. So you want to get that started as soon as possible. The other thing I recommend is-- and this is something that Joe kind of worked with us, is that before you go in and you build out your standard packages and your Takeoff types into an advanced template, you really want to go in and create a separate project that you can start to pull those in from all your other projects.

And so we have our users, as they're building out their Takeoff types on their projects, they'll then pull them into a single project, and then we can kind of vet them and kind of curate them a little bit, and then bring them into an advanced template.

Another kind of lessons learned was that our location settings are kind of a little bit-- well, they're locked down unless you set them up beforehand. And so this is something that's shared across all modules within ACC, so if you're using other modules, the location settings carry over. So you have to go into the settings, set them up. And then once you've set them up in one area, you can use them across all of the ACC. And so just knowing where that has gotten a little bit easier with the gear icon there. You just got to hit the tab that says "locations," and then you're good to go.

This is I think my favorite part about this whole platform, in that you have the ability for formulas, and really the syntax is pretty similar to Excel, it just is more of JavaScript-based, if I'm not mistaken. And so you have your different common items like math functions and constants, you've got some variables. For 2D, there's your standard areas, linear, counts. And then with the 3D, obviously, we want to go in and pull in and access the BIM properties. And so we'll do a little bit deeper dive on this, but this is something that-- let's say that you're used to working in Assemble, but we really didn't have formulas built in to the online platform. You kind of had to go to some outside tools for that.

And even some of these other 2D Takeoff tools that are on the market, they may or may not have-- well, they'll have calculations stuff, but they're kind of built in as types. This is 100% customizable. So pretty much whatever we've been able to think of, we've been able to build out within the formula systems. And pretty robust feature, actually.

JOE GAITHER: And to add to that, running the formulas within the Takeoff workflow is really going to allow you to eliminate that step of taking those general square footage, linear footage measurements, taking those elsewhere and calculating out the items of your assemblies. So you can gain efficiencies by building in those formulas directly into the Takeoff software so that you can calculate out each specific takeoff item that you'd want from a single takeoff measurement.

EDWIN BAILEY: Absolutely. And the best part about that is if somebody else comes in and looks at the Takeoff that you're doing, they don't have to hunt down an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that has the rest of your measurements in there. It's basically there. This is a shared repository, and then everybody can kind of see your thought process in how you were taking off the different elements.

So, with that, we have different Takeoff types. For the 2D, you've got your area, your linear, your counts. Each Takeoff type has a primary output, and then you can have quite a few additional outputs. And so that really allows you to build out some complex systems that you can go in and quantify very quickly.

The other thing is that you'll want to make sure that you fill in your classifications for all of those, especially when it comes to your templates and things, so that you minimize the amount of rework that you have to do there. There you can kind of see on screen there we've got some basic formulas here for the 2D, but let's just go into a little bit deeper dive on some examples.

I would say the sloped roof one is probably our most complicated formula. And so this one here, does have a height variable for the pitch on the roof there, and so you can update that as you need to, and then it calculates the pitched surface area for you in the 2D as you're drawing. So that's a good example there.

And then the other ones-- stud count, it's based off of your linear Takeoff tool where you're taking your distance and then times it by your waste factor there, and your stud spacing and stuff. So very similar for like the plywood sheets there. So that's just a quick example. I'm not going to spend too much time there, but you can kind of see how the syntax is just slightly different than what you would use within the Excel environment.

And we should have a handout that has some more examples, and maybe go into a little bit deeper dive on that. And there's some online resources we'll link in there as well.

JOE GAITHER: Yeah. Just to add to that, we can have basically an unlimited amount of items or conditions be calculated out using those formulas. So we can really get as granular as you want to get or stay as high level as you'd want to get. But you can build in waste factors, you can build in other formulas to just help gain that efficiency from running that right as you're performing in Takeoff.

EDWIN BAILEY: Well, and the good thing about that too is that you can do an output without your waste factor, and then you can calculate your waste factor separate or combined, or however you see fit. I mean, you pretty much can do whatever you want. It's pretty powerful. And, again, the nice thing is each output has its separate classification that you can assign. So you can spread it and allocate it wherever it needs to go.

So here's an example for the BIM model. The thing that's different about this is that you have your variables like your area and your length, but that's tied to a BIM model. And so the thing that is different is that you map those variables to different BIM components. And so for each Takeoff type-- or output, I would say-- you want to make sure that you're able to map that to your BIM parameters, whatever those might be. And those will vary in change.

And so that's really the difference between the 3D quantification, is that there's the model mappings that you have in addition to your formulas that you can do, OK?

JOE GAITHER: And this provides a lot of efficiency. When we're able to utilize those 3D models, that's where we're able to reference the dimensions that have already been laid out by that 3D model design. So we can become very efficient just by purely eliminating the takeoff measurement portion of the 2D workflow. And we can just tell the system what we want to quantify from the 3D, what properties we want to bring in, how we want to calculate on top of that, and, again, creating a very repeatable system with those repetitive Takeoff types.

EDWIN BAILEY: Exactly. And here's those same outputs for slopes and counts and plywood and et cetera. And this is based off of the BIM data and mapping to the model properties. You can see those are kind of definitely simplified compared to some of the 2D ones, but you've already got that data available in the model if you choose to use so.

Another topic that we're definitely looking to explore-- and I know other people maybe a little bit further ahead with the integration of the API-- but we use Power BI for analytics a lot, and so we definitely have the roadmap of taking the data, pushing it into Power BI, similar to how we do with the assemble tool as well as some other downstream workflows.

And so just being able to access that data and push it to other applications is pretty powerful. And the fact that that API is already set up and ready to go is great.

JOE GAITHER: Yeah, and just to share an example of something that I've heard from some of our customers who are using the API, we can definitely send that to outside systems, whether that's an accounting, ERP, estimating, project management solution. But I've also encountered some of our customers utilizing Power BI to not only create good dashboards that are good for management, review, and collecting our dashboards into good images and tables, but we also can utilize Power BI simply to reformat the data.

So if there is a different type of formatting that you need and you need to reformat that to get that into another system if that system doesn't accept API data and it does require Excel import, you can utilize other systems like Power BI to reformat the layout so that it matches the import of your other solution.

EDWIN BAILEY: That's great. So we mentioned the API. I would say this one definitely piqued our interest when we found out that Autodesk had built out an integration into EC3. And so EC3 is definitely an application that Skanska cares a lot about. We were there during the inception, during the creation of EC3, and had a lot of input. And so this is something that we try to do on all of our projects, and it's basically an embodied carbon calculator.

And we're able to then take our data-- and, again, this is where the master format classification comes in useful-- because then we can push that data with that classification into EC3 and then have that update between different versions, and then use that for our quantification into the EC3 platform. So pretty powerful there, actually.

One last kind of item here I want to talk about is just the model itself. I've found that there's different levels of use for the different users. Some people are very heavily relied on the 2D drawings, and they use the model as more of like a viewer to help them understand what's going on in the 2D drawings. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I would say that the next level is to then take the models, do your quantification in 2D and then also in 3D, and, I would say, create them in separate packages within the tool so that you can kind of keep them separate, and then do a little bit of a comparison between the two.

And what that allows you to do-- for people that are kind of new to the model workflow-- is build trust in those quantities. And then as you build that trust, then you can start to integrate the 3D quantities and the data from there into your regular Takeoff. And then that can be integrated in with your 2D Takeoff as well as the 3D. So that's kind of like that third tier that we see users kind of attain in the use case of the models.

Let's jump back here to a 2D Takeoff demo. And I know Joe's going to talk about some of these items here, so we'll turn the time over to him.

JOE GAITHER: Perfect. Yeah, so we're going to jump into a little bit of a demonstration here. Just to give you a little bit of an outline of what we're going to be covering, I'm going to start here with the kind of processing of our PDF sheets as we're pushing them into Autodesk Takeoff. Our OCR technology kicking in and helping us process those documents, making it easy for us to sort and filter through as we're performing our Takeoffs. We're going to talk about 2D Takeoff types. We did a little bit of that already. We'll show you that inside the tool, how we can calculate those items and perform some Takeoffs.

Additionally, we're going to look at locations. How we can apply locations to our takeoff items so that we can have that good location breakdown of your estimates. Additionally, we're going to talk about symbol detection. So we do have a tool that allows us to count up those repeatable fixtures or any sort of count items based off of a repeatable image on the PDFs.

We're also going to talk about Snapshots. Snapshots is our way of creating historical data within Autodesk Takeoff, and what that's going to allow us to do is ultimately refer back to those data points for comparisons, we'll be able to look at sheets, Takeoffs, as well as the quantities that were generated, and our 3D models as well.

And then, lastly, with those Snapshots, that's going to power our overlay and quantity comparisons. And then when we're going from revision to revision, we can easily load in a new revision of our sheet set or our 3D models, bring over those Takeoffs that we did on the previous revisions right to the current revision.

So let me share my screen here, and we can jump into a demonstration. OK. And so what you're seeing here is the home page of Autodesk Takeoff. And for those of you who are unfamiliar, we're here within Autodesk Construction Cloud. I'm in my Google Chrome Web browser, where we can access our information wherever we have internet access, and can log in with our Autodesk credentials.

And this is what opens up that communication and collaboration amongst all those who are operating in the Autodesk Construction Cloud environment. And as you can see here, Takeoff is one of the modules that we'll be picking from. Autodesk Construction Cloud is stacked on top of Autodesk Docs, which is our central file storage and collaboration piece here. And that, ultimately, is what Edwin was mentioning with that enhanced workflow. By loading our drawings and documents into the Docs environment, we will be able to benefit from the additional viewer capabilities that are housed within the Autodesk Docs space.

But starting off here, I want to talk about uploading our sheets first. So we're going to load those either from our files section, which is Autodesk Docs, or we're going to load those in from our computer. So we can load those directly in. And that simplified workflow versus the complex workflow here. So that's ultimately-- what will separate that, whether we're loading that in from files, it's a simple push from files into this space, where then we'll be able to jump in. And as we are processing that 2D PDF, it'll ultimately scan the document on its own. ORC technology is going to pick up that sheet numbers and sheet titles for you so that we can ultimately process an entire sheet set much more efficiently than having to go through and name and number of these individually.

And this is just going to help with our sorting and filtering and our organization here within Autodesk Takeoff. If, for whatever reason, it's picking up the wrong area on your drawings, you can always select the necessary drawings, redraw the area, or we can overwrite the text here. And we're going to do the same thing here with sheet numbers as we do with titles. And we can ultimately load those in, and we can also add tags. And tags are going to help with additional sorting and filtering so that we can search and filter our documents as needed.

In addition to our processing, we also have the ability to stack revisions. And so I'll show you some more on the revisions, how we update things, how we utilize our Snapshots and revision history historical data. But when we do load in new drawings, it's going to stack on top as a new revision as long as the sheet number matches with a sheet number that already exists within our Sheets and Models tab here. So we do have that ability to stack revisions, which is going to power some of our additional workflows. We do have the same thing here with our 3D models as well.

Once you have your drawing sets loaded in, we're simply going to-- we can select a drawing here, and we can select the package that we want to start performing Takeoffs in, and we are off and running. So we can select our PDFs here. And when we're inside of Takeoff, we will be toggling between Sheets and Models and our Takeoff types. So when we're here in the Sheets and Models, again, we're going to be able to and filter our PDF set to look at the Sheets that we want to. We have the ability to bookmark these to the top.

So if you're working and you know that you left off here on A-115, you can book A-115, bring that to the top, and that's where you need to pick up on the next run. Once you have your Sheet selected, we'll be coming down here to the Takeoff types. And so these are some example Takeoff types that I typically use.

And so, as an example, we can search, we can sort, we can filter through our sheet set here. So maybe if I want to come look at my 2 by 6 partition here-- let's go in and take a look and see what this is ultimately made of. So these are those repeatable Takeoff types, as we were mentioning, and we can have an unlimited amount here of outputs. So we can really get granular, if you'd like, or you can stay high level.

But, ultimately, you're setting yourself up for success by defining these. And each output here-- it's going to have its name, we're going to give it that classification. We can assign an additional classification as needed. So I have masterformat uniformat loaded in here. We're going to give it that unit of measure, and then we're going to build in that formula. Again, manipulating our data to give us what we want.

And then we can have manual inputs be a part of these. Manual inputs-- another kind of efficiency gainer here so that we don't have to have an overpopulated inventory of Takeoff types. These inputs can be different for each segment of drawing that we draw. And so I'll show you that here right now.

So I'm using the linear Takeoff tool with this Takeoff type. I can select this, come in, and we can begin drawing some segments. These are my 6-inch partitions here. I'm just going to draw a couple to show first. And we have some good navigation features. When we're in a Takeoff, if you don't want to scroll in or out or have to navigate around, if you just bring your cursor over to one side, it will move the screen for you so that you don't have to scroll in and out.

I'm typically used to operating in more of like a Revit environment, but I'm used to scrolling in and out-- typically how I navigate around a sheet set or a model-- but we do have that option. But, as I mentioned, we're going to perform some Takeoffs. It's going to give us a snapshot here of what our quantities are that we've quantified from these. And then, going forward from there, we can jump into the detailed Takeoff.

And, here, we can actually change those inputs. So if I know that these partition walls actually have different heights-- maybe they have different ceiling conditions for each of these-- I can actually come in and say, this one here, this is a 12-foot high, this one here is an 8-foot high, and we're going to leave this one here at 10-foot high. So we can actually have those be different for each Takeoff measurement.

EDWIN BAILEY: So I would say, for new users, that was kind of one thing that was a little bit confusing for a lot of people when they're picking that up. But it's a super powerful, like you mentioned, because you don't have to create a Takeoff type for, like, I have a 12-foot high wall, I have a 15-foot high wall. You just go in there and change the variable. So pretty powerful once you figure out how to utilize that.

JOE GAITHER: Yeah. And as we're performing these Takeoffs, all of our quantities are populating down here in the inventory, OK? So those Takeoffs that we just performed are down here in our partitions bucket. We can ultimately come click on these, and we're able to see some of our partition Takeoffs here.

All right. So moving on. When we do perform Takeoffs, we can ultimately select our Takeoff items, and we can apply those to locations. So the typical workflow here is that we're going to perform Takeoffs in a given area or given zone, given floor, and then we can ultimately come through and we can select everything on this floor by doing a drag and select. And if you highlight from left to right, it's going to grab everything that box encompasses. If you go right to left, it's going to grab everything that box touches. So you can select your items that way. You can also hold control or shift and select the items as needed. So I can draw those three partition Takeoffs here, and we can assign location.

So I have a nice location breakdown. These are my level one. I'm going to say these are part of Area A here in level 1. And now just assign those. We now can sort and group our inventory by location so that we can have our location breakdown for estimating.

And just to show, you as Edwin had mentioned earlier, no matter where you are, you can head over here to the Settings. So if you're within the Takeoff module in any other type of module here within Autodesk Construction Cloud, we can head over to the Settings, where you'll be able to click on locations here, and edit that location breakdown.

All right. The next thing I want to show here is symbol detection. So I have a nice mechanical drawing here, and my example is going to be counting these supplier diffusers. So we can ultimately come over here, select our Takeoff type. We can head down to the bottom, where we'll be able to select the symbol detection tool. And we're going to come in here, and we're ultimately going to draw our area around one of our diffusers here.

And we want to see, how many times is this repeating within our sheet? So now it's going to scan this sheet, and it's going to count these up. Basically what that's doing is looking at all the lines here on this drawing, and it's scanning that to see how many times those repetitive lines occur. So this is a 85%, 95%-- somewhere in there-- accurate. It does still require a review process just to make sure you have picked up everything. If there's additional lines running through things, as you can see with these two right here, then these didn't get picked up. As a part of our review, we will just come in and drop two there.

And we can see from the rest of this that everything else was picked up correctly.

All righty. So heading back to our Packages here. So I want to talk really quickly about Packages. Packages are our way of separating out our Takeoff items from one another, and it's basically a way for us to organize the information in a way that benefits us the most. So I am an Autodesk Product Specialist. I work on a team of product specialists who demo in this environment on a day to day basis. And we have decided to separate out ourselves in different architectural packages and different trade packages so that we don't really interfere with ourselves throughout the day.

But really the main thing you need to know here is that this is a way of creating a separation of your Takeoff quantities from one another. And so it's typically best to keep most of your quantification within the same place and utilize your masterformat or unit format, or whatever classification system you're using, to have that divisional breakdown and your bid package breakout. I like to think of the best use case here would be more of a conceptual versus a real estimate, or, as Edwin mentioned, a 2D package versus a 3D package, and we can use those for comparison.

But, really, when we're in one package, we won't be able to see the quantification that we performed in a different package. So it's really a way of a folder, file structure here to separate out our quantities from one another. But the reason we're here in Packages-- oh, sorry, Edwin. Did you want to--

EDWIN BAILEY: I was just going to say, that's a good thing too-- you may have different users, so I noticed that you've got names on architectural, so you may have somebody do some work in a Package and you don't want to step on each other's toes. You can reuse your sheets and models within those different packages.

JOE GAITHER: Yes. And then we can bring those Takeoff types from past Packages into our current Packages. So we can create a very repeatable workflow just by importing our Takeoff types from one past project into the current project. Or, as Edwin mentioned earlier, you can also have this be a part of project templates.

But the reason we're here in Snapshots is to talk about-- the reason we're here in Packages is to talk about Snapshots. Snapshots is our way of creating historical data here within Autodesk Takeoff. And so whenever you reach a specific milestone that you want to save a historical data point that you know you're going to refer back to-- that might be you finished your 75% CD estimate and you're sending that out to your clients-- that's something you're going to want to lock down as something you can refer to in the future.

We ultimately will save a snapshot here in Autodesk Takeoff. And what that's going to do is it's going to create a read-only copy of this entire project Takeoff environment so that we can refer back. So it's a read-only copy, and it cannot be edited. So, ultimately, when we save these-- you can see I've saved some over here-- the typical workflow is to get to that milestone, save that Snapshot, and then we're able to utilize that in our comparison tool to see some of our differences, which I'll show here. But then we also have the ability to load in our new PDF revisions, our new model revisions, and then we're able to take what we've previously done on those previous revisions, bring it over to the current revision.

So for our 2D drawing sets, that's taking those 2D Takeoffs that we've measured, dropping it right on top of the current PDF, editing as necessary to get up to date. And for our 3D model workflow, which Edwin will talk about here in a second, we're able to take those 3D Takeoffs and all the formulas we ran from the data coming from those models and apply that to the new model, providing an extreme Takeoff efficiency from revision to revision.

But let's take a look at our PDF overlay and quantity comparison, which is powered here-- very powerful when we're utilizing our Snapshots. So we can head up here-- once you've selected a 2D Sheet, you can head up here to the comparison tool.

When we select the comparison tool, we'll get the options up here to select what we want to see. So the ones here on the left, these are our Snapshots. So the work in progress is the current Snapshot. We can come back to any past Snapshot that we need to. Here, these are-- the second column here, these are our Packages. Third column is going to be the drawing.

So we can overlay any two drawings from those sets. And then the last one here is our Sheet sets, which Sheets set this comes from. And so I tried to make this a very obvious thing. So as a part of a previous Snapshot here, I drew very obvious shapes to show that, when we're looking at this, we have the ability to show and hide the Takeoffs or the Sheets from these two layers here.

So if I wanted to show the Takeoffs from my addendum two Snapshot on my current work in progress Sheet, I can do that. Or, if I wanted to show the other way around, we can show the previous revision here with those obvious shapes. And we can also just overlay maybe both of the Takeoffs on the current Sheet, right? So we can ultimately provide a very efficient workflow by turning on and off our different Takeoff items and Sheets here. And then, additionally, down here in the inventory, we're getting a quantity comparison.

So now this is taking all of the quantities that we have from 2D and 3D from those Snapshots and giving us our variance and difference change here. So this is actually going to calculate out those differences and provide that value to you so you can see how things are changing over time.

And then, to wrap this up, the last thing is, as we're going from revision to revision, we are able to bring those over-- bring over these Takeoffs to the current Sheet, to the current model, providing that very quick and efficient workflow. And that's everything I wanted to show here for the 2D side of things. We're going to go into more depth on the 3D and some of the things we can get from our Docs environment here next.

EDWIN BAILEY: OK, so now we're ready to do a little bit of demo here on 3D. I'm just going to talk a little bit. Here's the outline. I wanted to go over-- to start at the beginning when it comes to 3D within Revit, because that's where most of our models are coming from. So we'll talk about the Revit models. I have an enhanced workflow with Dynamo I kind of want to show you for some enhanced data. And then a little bit of some of the features within the 3D Takeoff tool, like the browser, the model clusters, some of the formulas, like we talked about. And then there's some enhanced workflows kind of there at the end with some parameters and some model coordination.

So that being said, let's jump over into our Revit project. OK, so here's just an example Revit project. When you're creating a project to go into ACC, typically it's going to be looking for your default 3D view. It may or may not be within your project still, so what I recommend is setting up a view with ACC in the project name. And you can say like, hey, this is for architectural or structural or whatnot. In this example, it's got a slightly different naming convention there.

But another thing that's recommended is to go into the visibility settings there, turn on-- manage the model categories, turn off your annotations, turn off analytical, and Revit links and stuff. And this is for more for that enhanced workflow within Docs. And so I like to just keep it simple on just model categories, and then have the worksets managed so that you can go in and turn on and off different parts of the model.

And so typically this needs to be curated by the design team because they know their models, so ask for them to go in and set up these views for you with some of those basic settings there. Then the next thing is to go into Publish Settings-- and there may be some other work sets in there, but what you want to do is you want to set up one-- and, who knows, this one may already exist-- but create an ACC set that's separate. And then any of your views for ACC, you can go in and turn those off. Save that, and then when you upload your models or you have them bridged over from the design team's account, then it will know which 3D views to extract and allow you to work with those.

And that can kind of become very beneficial too when you're working, say, with MEP files where you have multiple disciplines within a single file, and you want to extract those out separately. And so that's kind of an enhanced way of working, and pretty powerful once you know how to utilize the Publish Settings there, OK?

Let's take a look at this model inside of the tool. But before I do that, I just kind of wanted to show you, as far as data that's accessible, you have data as you select an object-- if it will let me select one. There we go. All right, so I have a panel assembly built out here, and you have your different properties here. You have your instance properties, your type properties. Anything that you can see here, that will all show up within the project.

Now, the first versions of these models, we did not have-- the square footage is broken down here for the different material items on this panel, so we ended up going into the family parameters and looking at the different dimensions in there, and pulling out some of those parameters as items that we could then quantify that. But they're able to go in and set those up themselves.

So inside the-- inside the Takeoff tool, here's that same project. We went in and we started to quantify the different elements within there, and then we're able to set up within a Takeoff type items where we're going in and calculating out, like, the square footage of the stone, the glass, the spandrel.

Now, we did have to end up utilizing certain variables here, and map them to some of the other BIM parameters to make that function. But that allowed us to get those quantities before those reporting parameters even existed in that model. So you'll find different element properties that may or may not be available, and then you can create your formulas inside this tool to calculate them out. That's kind of a little bit more of an advanced side of the 3D quantification process there, but you really get into the Revit models and the data, you can really leverage more and more of the model.

Whereas say you were looking at this in another tool, you may only get, like, the total square footage of what that panel is, and not have the sub-quantities for those different materials. And so that's something that we couldn't previously do in other platforms. So pretty powerful with the formulas, again, on what you can do with the data to format it in a way that you can make use of that information.

JOE GAITHER: Yeah, and when it comes to creating repeatable workflows, that's where Edwin's Revit expertise really comes in handy. And so when he's diving into that Revit model, he's setting his teams up for success by including additional model properties for them to access data. But if you're a subcontractor, a general contractor receiving models from outside sources, you'll be able to go through that review process, kind of see the properties that are available, bring those into your Takeoff types, and run those formulas to calculate out those items as needed.

EDWIN BAILEY: Well, and it comes back to communication back to design too. Because on one iteration, you may not have all the information you need, but you can still get the output that you desire. And then on the next model version, the design team might be able to provide more additional information in those elements. And everything's 100% customizable in what they can do and provide, you just have to communicate and ask for it a lot of times.

Here's a quick example. This was one of the items we were doing some quantification. We were just doing some analysis on one of our buildings here, and it happens to be that we kind of ran into a problem where we were trying to calculate the height of the structural column information. That wasn't a parameter that was readily available within the Revit parameters that I kind of mentioned. And so one of the things we ended up doing is using a Dynamo script to then extract and embed that information into the models before we upload.

So I kind of wanted to just show a quick example of that for one of our projects, the Montrose project here. And it allows us to then get some additional information into there. So, most of the time, we don't really run across any issues where we may be missing data, but within Revit I have a Dynamo script where you can kind of come in here-- and even though this information exists in there, it doesn't really give you the column height.

So it's giving us some volumes, it's giving us some other information. On some of these other item types, we may not have the volume if we're trying to calculate concrete. And so we have a Dynamo script here that all you really need to do is press a button and it will do some data prep for you. So if I select this here, it's going through, it's running, and it's taking a look at all of the columns and then adding a height as a parameter. It's looking at all of the foundations. And, even though there's a volume for it, it's not visible within the parameters, and so we're going in and we're adding that.