Troubleshooting Site Regions in a Site Takeoff

This question came up yesterday. The user was trying to work out what they were doing wrong in their Site Takeoff - their Site Regions did not appear to be working correctly. When they used the Identify Site Regions command the demolition areas assigned to the Original Category were not picking up and closing out as they thought they should.

The issue in this case was that they had some curb linework around a few islands in the demolition of the parking lot that were on the incorrect layer (assigned to Design rather than Original) - the inner line of the curb was on the correct layer, the outer lines were on the wrong layer, and then they had drawn in some lines connecting the islands to limit the pavement demolition area, however they had drawn them to the lines that were on the incorrect layer - so while the islands were getting picked up as closed out areas, the parking area was not.

There are three potential fixes to this problem

  • Relayer the lines that were on the incorrect layer onto the Demo layer that is categorized for Original
  • Move the ends of the parking area lines so that they touch or cross the parking island lines to close out the areas
  • Increase the Site Takeoff Gap Closure tolerance so that the gaps between the ends of the lines around the parking area and the parking island lines get closed automatically

The simplest way to troubleshoot these types of issue are as follows

  • In the view filter manager if you right click and select “View Original Layers” then the system will show you the linework that is assigned to layers that have been categorized as Original for Takeoff purposes. Once these are visible, walk yourself around the takeoff area that you think should be closed to find the gap or gaps and then determine what you want to do to fix them (as above).
  • If lines are missing, then again use the same method to select “View Design Layers” to see if you have incorrectly categorized some layers or to see if some linework has been drawn on the wrong layers. If yes recategorize the layer or relayer the objects onto the correct layers.
  • Go to Project Settings - Computations - Takeoff and change the Gap Closure tolerance to e.g. 1.0’ to see if that fixes the issue - if it does then you know you have gaps to hunt down and fix.

Video shows you how

Hopefully this helps you to troubleshoot your model

Alan

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