This work emerged out of necessity. In the design and application process of wooden frame structures, where we put thousands of pieces together like a puzzle, the issue of preparing and updating quantity and measurement lists requires the most effort. Hours spent on this and the possibility of making mistakes are very high. However, with the Quantity Surveyor I developed in Grasshopper, you can generate measurement lists almost in real-time. All that needs to be done is to model each wooden piece correctly as a closed BREP and it should be on a layer with the appropriate category name. Thus, the code takes objects, sizes them after calculating the smallest bounding box, and extracts layer names. It counts and lists objects of the same size found in the same layer.

This Grasshopper definition reads all the BREP objects, categorizes them by their layers, calculates their minimum bounding box dimensions, and counts the number of copies for each object. The input of the tool is the automatic Geometry Pipeline for BREP objects. You can also reference any set of BREPs in your Rhino document. The outputs are a series of Panels. You can copy data and paste to Excel for further analysis or printing. The code is using native Grasshopper and Python components. Thus, no add-ons are necessary for it to work.

You can rebuild the definition by looking at the diagram above. However, there are Python components. One of them is getting the layer name of the objects. The other code is counting the number of copies for each piece. So, if you want to download my Grasshopper file; would you consider being my Patreon? Here is the link to my Patreon page including the working Grasshopper files for the Quantity Surveyor and more.