Mastering Bluebeam Measurement Tools for Efficient Takeoffs and Accurate Construction Estimating

Now that we've looked at a diameter, we can look at the next few tools on the list here. So the next few Center Radius, Three Point Radius, and Angle are not tools that we will be using a ton in our course today, but just to show what they do. So Center Radius, we'll click on that one and we'll scroll up a bit.

Let's say that we are going to do a center radius of three foot something, three foot, right? We would draw the center radius, and all this does is it just draws the full circle of that three foot O center radius around. So this would be used in my mind to almost like confirm that rooms have the proper turn radius or ADA compliant radius inside of them. So not something that we're going to do a lot of takeoffs from.

Back to our tools list here, Three Point Radius, we'll click on that one. We would pick two points and then we would be able to draw our three point radius. Again, something that we would not be using a ton to do takeoffs from, but a valuable part of Bluebeam.

And then the next one here is going to be Angle. Angle is we are just clicking three times on the plans, so one end of the angle to the other end. It just gives us the degree of the angle that we've drawn there.

So could be used for maybe like some slope related items, but really not a ton that we are going to be diving into within this course. Jumping down further here, Volume. This is definitely something that we're going to be using, so let's click on the Volume tool.

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And the Volume tool is going to be the same motions as an area takeoff, right? We start in one corner, we click all around the corners of the area until we get back to the starting corner. But instead of stopping here like we would do at an area takeoff, what we can do is we can go into our tools drop-down, we can go into our toolbars, and let's turn on the Properties toolbar. When I turn that on, you can see what just appeared.

This toolbar right below all of my takeoff toolbars. This Properties toolbar houses a lot of information related to the takeoff. So anything from color, to opacity, to line width, to fill and hatch.

A really helpful toolbar to be able to change and edit how some of our takeoffs look visually. But what we can also do in here for things like a volume takeoff, is we can hit this drop-down, this Units drop-down. And in this Units drop-down, that is where we can actually fill in the depth of the volume takeoffs that we are looking to perform.

So of that square or rectangle that we've just taken off, let's say that we are taking off the concrete pour in there, and it's going to be a six inch pour. We would simply type in six, that is in feet right now. So let me just type in zero dash six.

We would type in zero feet six inches, and then that would give us the cubic foot or even cubic yardage. We could go to volume, we could change the measurement that we're trying to get. But long story short, is that for a volume takeoff, we can control the depth of it within this Properties bar, in this Units drop-down.

So back to the tools area here to finish out this initial review. The next one, Polygon Cutout and Ellipse Cutout. These are going to come in handy during our course today quite a bit.

If we're doing something like a takeoff of the exterior of a building, and there are windows in that exterior. If we're doing a stucco takeoff of the entire exterior, we are not going to want to count those windows within that stucco takeoff. So what this cutout allows you to do, is actually create a negative area within an existing takeoff.

We'll do an example in this shaft area. If I want to basically do a cutout of this box with the note 6 in it, I can draw an area in there. Hit the right corner.

So as you can see, that cutout will take away from the takeoff that is existing. Really good for, you know, exterior windows, door penetrations, roofing penetrations, anything like that, this cutout tool is going to be super helpful for. Back up into that toolbar, the Ellipse Cutout is the same concept, but it's just going to be a different shape.

So instead of it being a square or rectangular shape, it's going to be a circular or an ellipse shape. So let's just draw a little kind of oval here, and we can see that that cutout is performed as well. Finishing out our tools list, we have Count.

Count is going to be a very simple and basic one, but it's going to be used quite a bit within our dataset today. We will click on Count, and you can see that this icon shows up with this checkmark, and this is going to be as simple as us just clicking on the areas that we want to count. So I'm moving down the plans to find something we can count here, whatever, let's just count up these notes, for example.

So hey, number 14, I see one of them there, I see another one over here. All I'm doing is left-clicking, and it's leaving a checkmark over that item that I'm trying to count up. So really, really simple to do that count, and we will get more in-depth with that as we start to move throughout our set today.

And the last tool that I want to show off is, all the way down at the bottom, this Dynamic Fill. Now, when we're doing area takeoffs time and time again on these plans, it can get quite time-consuming. So Bluebeam has this great feature called Dynamic Fill that can really allow us to save a lot of time when performing different types of takeoffs.

So let's click on Dynamic Fill, and what we're first going to do is, down in this toolbar here, we can see that there is an area to add a boundary. So let us add a boundary to this living room. We will grab a corner of a wall, and we will take it straight up to this wall up here.

We've added one boundary there, and then we hit ENTER. And this doorway here, let's add a boundary there as well. We'll click on one end of it, it will go over to the other, click left, and then hit ENTER.

We've created another boundary. So the beauty of Dynamic Fill, we can go down here, and we can click on this Fill item right next to the Boundary tool that we were just using. When we have Dynamic Fill on, all I'm doing is clicking left and holding the mouse, and simply dragging this Fill tool all around the area that I want it to do a takeoff for.

Now you can see that I drew boundaries here and here, because these are both open doorways and open passageways. If I didn't draw those boundaries, this Fill takeoff would be leaking out into the kitchen area. But I don't want that, I just want to do the living room.

So however long I hold on the mouse for, that is how long the takeoff is going to keep working. So you do have to be a little careful, you don't want to hold this in the entire time, because then it might flood out into other areas that you don't want to do a takeoff for. But the time that that took, versus how long it would take me to draw an area box all the way around this, and account for all of the different bump-outs and cut-outs and crevices, this Dynamic Fill tool is a very big time-saver to be able to do lots of different takeoffs.

I like to use it for area takeoffs, it can also be used for volume as well. And we will certainly be using this in more practical applications as we get into our day a little bit more, doing takeoffs on the course. Just as a quick refresher, that was all of the different measurement tools that are in our drop-down menus, and this is what we're mainly going to be using in our course today.