Chapter 18

Quantity Takeoff

The goal of every project is eventual construction. Before the first bulldozer can be fired up and the first pile of dirt moved, the owner, city, or developer has to know how much all of this paving, pipe, and dirt are going to cost. Although contractors and construction managers are typically responsible for creating their own estimates for contracts, the engineers often perform an estimate of cost to help judge and award the eventual contract. To that end, many firms have entire departments that spend their days counting manholes, running planimeters around paving areas, and measuring street lengths to figure out how much striping will be required.

Civil 3D includes a Quantity Takeoff (QTO) feature to help relieve that tedious burden. You can use the model you’ve built as part of your design to measure and quantify the pieces needed to turn your project from paper to reality. You can export this data to a number of formats and even to other applications for further analysis.

In this chapter, you will learn to:

• Open and review a list of pay items along with their categorization
• Assign pay items to AutoCAD objects, pipe networks, and corridors
• Use QTO tools to review what items have been tagged for analysis
• Generate QTO output to a variety of formats for review or analysis