Autodesk Quantity Take Off

Back in June Autodesk released its version of a bill of material program to use in conjunction with DWF's. For several years Autodesk's third party add-ons like Quickpen and CAD MECH have included this with their program but for a hefty price. I recieved a trial version of QTO (Quantity Take Off) shortly after it was released and was disappointed. I expected to be able to export my 3D DWF to the program and have it spit out a material list, thus justifying the $1995.00 price tag. The program seemed to be able to pick up on pipe fittings and their quantities pretty well but pipe and pipe lengths were another story. So far there is not much support for the product being so new but the Autodesk rep. had some work-arounds and assured me that the glitches would be taken care of in the next release. The program had some good features that allowed you to assign monetary values for each of the items to produce a cost associated with your BIM and BOM.

Before I pulled my hair out with the program pulled my hair out with scheduling inside of AutoCAD MEP 2008. Once I figured out how to properly setup a schedule using property data sets calculating the materials was a breeze. This method had some hiccups in it as well. To schedule pipe lengths and add their totals up and give you a sum the easiest way I could find was to isolate each pipe size and the create a schedule for every size. The only way you could isolate pipes based on their size was to have all the piping into one drawing which made my machine puke on several occasions. The fittings and MvParts were no problem to schedule. I could even schedule them through xrefs and the schedules updated when changes were made. When I schedule piping through xrefs it would spit out on large table with only a sum of all pipe in the drawing instaed of a sum of each specific size. I think the next release of QTO will be benificial to purchase, but for know I will continue to pull my hair out with only one program. I found a clip on You Tube with Brian Haines giving a demonstration as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q90ynbvQo40

AutoCad MEP 2009 SP1

I downloaded SP1 the other day and to my dismay some crippling issues still were not resolved.
1) When you edit a piping through an xref in place the piping does not stay connected to the fittings attached. Normally when using the grip edits (the largest advantage to MEP), all the fitting move with the pipe and you then have sucessfully been more productive than vanilla CAD drafting practices, in 2009.... "not so much".

2) This was not necerssarily an issue resulting from 2009 but I thought it would be worth mentioning: Adding Mvparts, there should be an option similiar to pipe adding to lock elevation. Most of the time I find myself having to go back in and change the elevations after the equipment placed.

If any of you out there have any other Beefs let me know.