Material List Polyline - one side of wall

[BenLondon]

Hi All

 

I'm trying to get a handle on using the material list polyline and am having trouble getting the list to correctly count drywall boards.  

 

See the attached small laundry room that we are goint to be remodeling back from the studs.  The remodel will call for new drywall on the laundry room sides only of the walls.  Is the Material List Polyline smart enough to tell me what I need for drywall on the ceiling and interior wall surfaces only.  As you can see, I positioned the line in the center of the walls and "Include Contained Objects" with the hope it would give me the one side of the wall only, but the result is not correct.   Ideas?

 

Thanks!

[ValleyGuy]

7 hours ago, BenLondon said:

Hi All

 

I'm trying to get a handle on using the material list polyline and am having trouble getting the list to correctly count drywall boards.  

 

See the attached small laundry room that we are goint to be remodeling back from the studs.  The remodel will call for new drywall on the laundry room sides only of the walls.  Is the Material List Polyline smart enough to tell me what I need for drywall on the ceiling and interior wall surfaces only.  As you can see, I positioned the line in the center of the walls and "Include Contained Objects" with the hope it would give me the one side of the wall only, but the result is not correct.   Ideas?

 

Thanks!

 

If this room is all that you are trying to calculate for, manually estimating is by far the easiest, quickest, and the best sheet size optimizing way. I see five walls that drywall would possibly be best if stood upright, a window and a door opening. There is going to be waste and it needs to be accounted for. Drywall comes in different widths and lengths and can be ordered to save unnecessary waste. As the program will either give you a wall sqft area, or number of sheets based off of that sqft, you are most likely going to get less than pleasing real world board count numbers (I'm not sure that two different board size measurements are even possible in a single material specification on Chief). For example, it would be silly to have the materials list give you a 4'x8' sheet count for a 9'6" x 9'10" room. It's much easier to say 7-10's and 4-8's will cover the walls, with 3-10's for the ceiling. However, you will need to adjust accordingly if you are wanting green board and it only comes in 4x8 sheets. Or maybe you have 9 ft ceilings and want 54" wide drywall that your supplier only stocks in 12's. Or maybe you have 10' ceilings and you will want to stand all the drywall upright and therefore only order 10' sheets. Maybe there are physical barriers (like stair headroom clearances and hallway corners) that only allow you to use a specific size board. As you can see, you will have different sqft totals, different amounts of waste, and different board counts all for the same room, just because of different real world scenarios. 

 

What you are trying to accomplish is somewhat possible in the materials list a couple different ways, albeit a different approach than just using the poly line. It will definitely take a lot more effort vs adding up the sheets manually for this tiny room. Material lists are sometimes still best done old school for optimal real world results. 

 

If you are still wanting to forge ahead with getting Chief to give you a number in the materials list: the easiest way is to probably make two different wall types for the two different walls that you have (2x6 and 2x4) making up this room. Make the wall layer on one side have a new material for the drywall, call it something different (like 'laundry room drywall' ) and give it a specific wall layer colour to show up in plan view. Replace the original walls you have shown with the newly made walls making sure that the new 'laundry room drywall' material layer is inside the room. Make a new materials list and look for the new 'laundry room drywall' - you may need to delete other items from those specific walls that you may not want like studs and drywall from the other side.

 

 

[basketballman]

1 hour ago, ValleyGuy said:

 

If this room is all that you are trying to calculate for, manually estimating is by far the easiest, quickest, and the best sheet size optimizing way. I see five walls that drywall would possibly be best if stood upright, a window and a door opening. There is going to be waste and it needs to be accounted for. Drywall comes in different widths and lengths and can be ordered to save unnecessary waste. As the program will either give you a wall sqft area, or number of sheets based off of that sqft, you are most likely going to get less than pleasing real world board count numbers (I'm not sure that two different board size measurements are even possible in a single material specification on Chief). For example, it would be silly to have the materials list give you a 4'x8' sheet count for a 9'6" x 9'10" room. It's much easier to say 7-10's and 4-8's will cover the walls, with 3-10's for the ceiling. However, you will need to adjust accordingly if you are wanting green board and it only comes in 4x8 sheets. Or maybe you have 9 ft ceilings and want 54" wide drywall that your supplier only stocks in 12's. Or maybe you have 10' ceilings and you will want to stand all the drywall upright and therefore only order 10' sheets. Maybe there are physical barriers (like stair headroom clearances and hallway corners) that only allow you to use a specific size board. As you can see, you will have different sqft totals, different amounts of waste, and different board counts all for the same room, just because of different real world scenarios. 

 

What you are trying to accomplish is somewhat possible in the materials list a couple different ways, albeit a different approach than just using the poly line. It will definitely take a lot more effort vs adding up the sheets manually for this tiny room. Material lists are sometimes still best done old school for optimal real world results. 

 

If you are still wanting to forge ahead with getting Chief to give you a number in the materials list: the easiest way is to probably make two different wall types for the two different walls that you have (2x6 and 2x4) making up this room. Make the wall layer on one side have a new material for the drywall, call it something different (like 'laundry room drywall' ) and give it a specific wall layer colour to show up in plan view. Replace the original walls you have shown with the newly made walls making sure that the new 'laundry room drywall' material layer is inside the room. Make a new materials list and look for the new 'laundry room drywall' - you may need to delete other items from those specific walls that you may not want like studs and drywall from the other side.

 

 

As a former builder I can tell you that the information above is 100% on the money.

  I use a custom template in Excel to get this kind of accuracy and account for what Chief cannot do.

[BenLondon]

My apologies, I should have made it clearer from the beginning, I am using this tiny room as an example.  

 

I of course know how to measure for drywall in the real world, I was really using this exercise to test the accuracy/usability of material lists within chief to build confidence that Chief will pump out accurate indoor within a material list polyline. After looking through several other posts it looks like this is a common ask that Chief has not addressed for over a decade;  there should be a way for chief to deliver accurate square footage of ALL surfaces, walls and ceilings, within a material list poly line. Afterall, CA calculates base boards and trim just fine so why can it not calculate the perimeter of a room and multiply it by the ceiling height to give the wall areas for the selected sides of walls only?  This is a basic tool that needs some work still.

 

 

[DBCooper]

I think it is all or nothing for the whole wall.  You can change your material list polyline to include intersected objects or contained objects but that won't really help in your case.  The only way to get the drywall on one side is if the wall is included but then you also get the drywall for the other side.

 

It would be so much easier if you could just setup your material list from room to include the drywall.  You might want to send in a feature request for this.

 

 

[ValleyGuy]

2 hours ago, BenLondon said:

why can it not calculate the perimeter of a room and multiply it by the ceiling height to give the wall areas for the selected sides of walls only?  This is a basic tool that needs some work still.

 

 

Yes I totally agree that it would be nice if they could do a little work on it to provide the wall surface area too.

 

You may want to check out this earlier thread, it may give you a little more info on how to get individual sides of drywall to show in the materials list.

 

 

[BenLondon]

Following on, I moved my boundry out to see what happened (see attached) to the list and changed the ceiling paint to white figuring the WB paint numbers are basically the same as my drywall numbers.  I only have 4.00sqft of walls????  This tool is whack....unless I have some incorrect settings somewhere which would mean at best it is not intuitive or user friendly.  

 

Again, this is just a test to see if I can rely on much larger areas within a plan for generating material lists.  

 

 

[ValleyGuy]

2 hours ago, BenLondon said:

Following on, I moved my boundry out to see what happened (see attached) to the list and changed the ceiling paint to white figuring the WB paint numbers are basically the same as my drywall numbers.  I only have 4.00sqft of walls????  This tool is whack....unless I have some incorrect settings somewhere which would mean at best it is not intuitive or user friendly.  

 

Again, this is just a test to see if I can rely on much larger areas within a plan for generating material lists.  

 

 

The materials list in Chief can actually produce very detailed and specific lists, but like I said, it takes a lot of work. If Chief put some more effort into connecting the room name in the poly line, then it might eliminate a lot of this work needed to produce a good material list.
I did a little mock up room similar to yours and came up with a few more items on the list. I am not aware of a neat way to isolate just the LDY room items. 
Here are a few things that you will need to consider if you want to keep on going with it:
1) Many different walls with many different individual layers, all making the distinctions between rooms. Thats how to get individual sides of each wall. Many different materials for many different rooms. You may want to use style palettes to spray rooms, and group save walls in the library. You could minimize some of the work by minimizing the number of layers.

2) Individually adjust every single wall's components  (ie: I opened up a wall > Components --- Green Board Walls LDY > Code --- typed in "LDY".... then move to Drywall Main Floor > Code ---- typed in "Bed #1"..... the same for paint on green board, paint on drywall, primer on green board, primer on drywall, VB, insulation and anything else making up that specific wall. The amount of work is tied to how much you want to separate out. I used many different wall layers here, but it could be thinned down to just include drywall.

3) Make sure that all of your materials are measuring how you want them to read (ie 4x8 sheets or 54"x12' or sqft area or LFT...)

4)Make sure that the individual components are under the appropriate ID. The material list is driven by ID labels such as Flooring, Insulation, Wall Board,... Having the wall vapour barrier in the wall board ID and the paint in the framing ID will make your material list a mess to read. Also, if you don't report framing on the material list and some drywall is mistakenly in the framing ID, you will never know about it.

5) Put your material list in an order to easily read. Also do the usual stuff like making columns appropriate sizes (in the actual list) and eliminating unwanted columns (in Preferences).

 

Just start messing around with the material list, you may find ways to customize it better toward your needs.

 

Good luck with it.

 

 

[SHCanada2]

3 hours ago, BenLondon said:

I only have 4.00sqft of walls????  This tool is whack

post the plan, something is going on

[glennw]

There are many settings that can be adjusted while trying to create materials list including what floors/categories to include, material list defaults, the method of selection, calculate materials in room, calculate materials in polyline, etc........then there are the settings that need to be further defined like:

Quote

If a Materials List Polyline is configured in such a way that it includes a room, a Materials List created from it will include the floor and ceiling finish materials and substrate materials like sheathing and insulation for the entire room: not just within the polyline.

 

and:

 

An object will be counted in the Materials List if its center point is located inside the room.

 

Once you have all the ducks lined up it should work pretty well.

[BenLondon]

I contacted support and here is their explanation FYI:

 

Hi Ben,

It is true that, unfortunately, the Material Region Polyline does not break down materials to that level of specificity. When calculating materials, the Materials List first breaks down what it needs to calculate based on layers, then determines what objects are on those layers, then breaks down the materials across all found objects within that scope. However, it does not break down objects to their smallest parts--their components, which materials are applied to--and that's the key element here: the Materials List is looking at the materials that are applied to Objects, not individual Components.

While the Materials List Polyline may seem like it's minimizing the scope to "what materials (i.e., components) are inside this polyline?", what it's really doing is looking to find what Objects are within the polyline, then calculating all of the materials associated to all of the components of of those objects. A simple example is if you draw a simple 4 wall structure, then draw a Materials List Polyline that snaps right along the drywall/framing layer, with the intent of calculating the Drywall but not the studs. However, the Materials List will still find the Framing, OSB, Housewrap, and Siding layers of those 4 walls because the Walls in their entirety are being included into this calculation (it will also find roof rafters, floor joists, etc., etc.). The length of the wall is also an important factor here, as many times you'll have one wall that spans across several rooms, so if your material polyline cut off at an intersection, but the wall technically extended well past that point, you would need to place a wall break at that intersection in order to limit how much of that wall is being factored in as well.


Given that you are doing this for a remodel, here are a few suggestions that will not only help materials calculate correctly, but also may be good for plan views, sections, etc.:

Because we're calculating the Materials of the walls in the plan, one of the most accurate ways to calculate them is to accurately model them.
If you create a copy of your common wall types and create copies that are specifically stated as being Remodel walls, you can create and apply different Drywall materials as-needed.

For instance, in the attached plan I first renamed the "Drywall" material to "Existing Drywall" so that all the walls currently using Drywall will be using Existing Drywall. I then created a copy of the Exterior wall and two interior walls, applying a new "New Drywall" material to the Exterior wall, one side of one interior wall and both sides of the other. This allows me to choose the level of Remodel I am doing within this plan, and automatically the program will determine how much Existing drywall I have vs New drywall.

It's worth noting that this can also be done on the walls' Framing layers as well. So I might rename the "fir framing 2" material that all existing walls are using to "Existing Framing" and create a new wall type that specifies a new "New Framing" material. This will calculate new framed walls from existing framed walls. But I still may want to exclude those existing materials from the Materials List.

Another layer of the Wall Type Definitions dialog is the new Display Layer option. This allows me to set specific wall construction layers onto their own custom display layer. For example, I could create a "Drywall, Existing" layer and a "Drywall, New" layer, and associate the wall layers of my new wall types accordingly. This gives two immediate benefits:
1) because the Materials List calculates object materials By Layer, you can simply uncheck the "Drywall, Existing" layer from the Materials List Layer Set to immediately exclude those layers and their materials from the Materials List
2) in Plan views or section/camera views you now have the choice to hide the existing and show only new drywall, or hide the new drywall in 3D views to show a sort of mid-remodel type of view, showing the room after the old drywall was removed but before the new drywall has been added.

The only drywall this won't cover, of course, is your Ceiling - removing the "Rooms" layer from the Materials List Layer Set will remove that, though. Unless of course you're re-doing the ceiling as well, in which case that room can just be set to use the New Drywall material and add to your calculations! This is probably a good time though to also suggest potentially creating different Materials List Layer Sets if you need to calculate different things at different times.

Lastly, I'd saved a Materials List in this plan that you can find in the Project Browser which is now isolating only the new Drywall in Room A and partial wall of Room C. Taking section views and manually calculating the size, the Materials List looks to be very close - I think there's some drywall thickness amount that I'm likely not taking into account somewhere.

You may point out at this time that the Materials List normally calculated SHEETS of drywall, not area. When double-clicking into the Count cell in the Materials List, you'll normally see the formula it's using is "=material_data.quantity", but changing it to simply "=area" (can be done by pressing the >M button), it will instead show the sq ft area, rather than the estimated sheet number.

While this all seems like a lot, if you do all of this once and save it in your Plan Template, you'll be able to come back to and re-use these wall types, materials, Layers, and Layer Sets for any future plans.