Explore the process of finalizing the exterior details for a building, focusing on the roof level, using bluebeam revu. Uncover the step-by-step procedure, from running a takeoff for a standing seam metal roof, to using the dynamic fill tool for a built-up flat roofing, and calculating the parapet's height for membrane roofing.
Key Insights
- The standing seam metal roof takeoff is done by approximating the area between the dashed lines in the blueprints. This helps ensure that areas are not double-counted during the takeoff process.
- The dynamic fill tool in bluebeam revu is a time-saving feature for area takeoffs. It is particularly beneficial when dealing with fully enclosed areas like a flat roof. It automatically fills up areas based on the selected takeoff item, eliminating the need for manually drawing boxes around the area.
- Bluebeam Revu's properties bar allows users to add additional parameters such as depth and slope during a takeoff. It is particularly useful when dealing with aspects like the parapet of a roof, where the height needs to be calculated to determine the amount of roofing required.
This lesson is a preview from our Blueprint Reading & Construction Estimating Course Online (includes software) and Construction Estimating Certification Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Alright, so let's finish up the remainder of the exterior items that we have here, and those are going to be up at the roof level. So let's go over to sheet 13 here and see what we have from a roofing standpoint. We've got this detail 4, as well as over here we've got a few details 1 and 7 and 5. So detail 4 is going to be uniclad metal roof.
So that is going to be that standing seam roof that we already started to see some of when we were doing our takeoffs of the elevations. And when you look at the dashed lines here, you can actually see the extent of what was shown in the overhang on the elevations versus what is purely on the top of the music room that we did not yet take off. We're going to go ahead and finish up this standing seam metal, but we are only going to take off the area in between these dashed lines to make sure that we are not double counting anything.
Now let's go over to our tool chest here, and we do already have a standing seam metal roof takeoff created. We're simply going to grab that and go ahead and just run this takeoff. And we'll grab it and bring it down all the way across and back up.
And there we have the remainder of our standing seam at the music room. We do have a little section over here as well, so we're going to go ahead and take this off quickly. And there we go with our standing seam metal roof.
That is going to be our totals. Now for number one, our typical built-up flat roofing, this is where we're going to get a little bit advanced with our area takeoff tactic. We're going to go ahead and use the dynamic fill tool here.
Learn Construction Estimating
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And this is a little bit more advanced, but it does save quite a bit of time when doing area takeoffs. So first let's go ahead and create ourselves a membrane roofing takeoff item. We can just duplicate what we've got already, and go to that duplicate.
And let's go ahead and change the properties. And first we're going to call this membrane roofing. Okay, we're going to go ahead and give this a color.
Let's give this a nice light blue color. And from a specification section standpoint, we're going to go ahead and make this an 075810 membrane roofing. We have our takeoff item.
Now let's go ahead and jump into dynamic fill. And in our tools drop down, we are going to go into measure, and we are going to choose dynamic fill here. Now sometimes you may have to draw boundaries.
Like when we did our training in the beginning, I had to draw boundaries at doorways and things where there was no lines on the plans to hold in the dynamic fill. But this roof area, it is fully enclosed with lines, so we actually do not have to draw boundaries. So let's just go ahead and hit our fill tool.
When we do, it's going to bring a cursor up, and all we do is hold on our mouse as we drag the dynamic fill around the area, and we'll see that it will start to fill up with color and do the takeoff for us. So I'm just going to left click and hold, and then start to drag this fill all around, and we see how it fills up automatically. That quickly, we're able to do area takeoffs with dynamic fill.
Next step is to go to the area takeoff section and hit the drop down list. What this is going to do is it's going to pull all of my different tools from the tool chest that are area takeoffs. So you can see there's an arrow down here, we can keep scrolling down if we need to.
The one that we've just created is this membrane roofing. So let's go ahead and assign the dynamic filled area to membrane roofing, and we'll just hit apply, and there we go. As simple as that, we were able to do a roofing takeoff without having to draw boxes around the whole area.
So dynamic fill really comes in handy when you're doing lots of different takeoffs at a fast rate. It really, really makes it easy for you. So let's go ahead and close this, and what I also want to do is, so we captured the roofing on the horizontal part, but I do know that the roofing is going to be running up the parapet as well if we take a look at this detail 6 on D7.4. So jumping into our thumbnails, we can go to sheet number 18, D7.4, and that parapet detail was going to be this detail 6 here.
We can see that our built-up roofing sloping to the drain is going to do the horizontal, it's going to go up through the corner, and then it is going to wrap up under the parapet cap. So let's go ahead and find the height of our parapet to figure out how much roofing we need to add to account for the vertical. In order to best find the height of our parapet, we can go to one of our elevation plans, and let's go up to west elevation on A5.1, and what we can see here is the top of plate being at 2110, and the top of the parapet being at 24.
So let's just assume that there is about two feet of roofing, and then there will be a parapet cap that will add a little bit. We'll say an extra two feet is what we'll carry for the membrane roofing all the way around. So let's go ahead and go back to the roofing plan here, and we're going to finish off with a takeoff of the roofing required for the parapet.
So as we looked at, we're going to have an extra two feet of roofing that's going to go vertical up the parapet. So let's just go ahead and do a quick takeoff for that right now. And another thing to note before that, this does have a very small slope to it.
So to account for things like slopes as well, once we've done a takeoff, we can always go up to our properties bar up at the top, and we can hit this units drop down, and this is where we can add some additional parameters here. If we wanted to turn this into something with depth, we could add a depth. And if we do have a slope, we can put a slope in here.
So this one is a half inch for every foot. So let's just go ahead and put 0.5 in here, and we can see that that really slightly changes this because it is a very basic slope. It's not very severe, but a really, really easy way to be able to make any of those changes is just up in this properties bar.
And as we move forward with this parapet takeoff, we'll see another really good use for it too. So what we're going to do here for the parapet is we're just going to create a perimeter takeoff, and let's just go ahead and call it membrane roofing at the parapet. And we can delete this label that was already there.
We can make it the same color as the horizontal roofing, and let's just go ahead and put this back to a 076100. I'm sorry, 075810 membrane roofing. And let's just go ahead and do this takeoff right now.
Let's go ahead and ring this whole parapet here. Great. We've done the perimeter, and now we have the length, and since the parapet is going to be two feet high, we want to add a depth to it.
So let's go ahead and put in two feet, and we're going to get a square footage number. We can go ahead and do that. So that's our length, and our area is going to be in square footage.
Okay, and let's go over to our totals here, and we can see that we have the length of 88 and a quarter, but then our wall area of 176 square feet. So that's a really, really easy way to be able to almost do some conversions on the spot, as well as add additional parameters related to takeoffs that we're doing. So that is going to be all of our exterior work today.
Well done, everyone. In the next video, I'll show you how to export your work for the midterm.
