They acquired Civilcad, an Australian CAD/design program in 1991, primarily for the survey and construction markets. Topcon has been in the digital takeoff market for a long time, too. Contractors will take our reports and put them into their estimation software and apply things like labor, production rates, and equipment costs,” says Sharp. “We do a certain degree of the cost in our software, such as the cost of materials, installation costs, but we don’t do a full estimate. Trimble’s takeoff reports give you a master Excel report that you can take into the estimating process. Piece together all the 3D information based on what is in the plans and then build up a set of 3D line work that represents the contours of the features and from those, you make surface models. It aids in counting, but not in identifying, objects in relation to other objects.įor 3D takeoffs, you can start from paper plans and digitize them. It gets used for things such as white striping on a road, the number of street lights to be installed, or the number of trees to be planted. Trimble offers two-dimensional and three-dimensional takeoff. 2D sums up the totals, such as point data, line data, or area-based data which goes into an Excel-like spreadsheet and gives you all of the areas, lengths, and counts. So, we built a product from the ground up.” “Its goal was to bring together the takeoff models such as PayDirt and TerraModel it provides the model-building capabilities of TerraModel, plus the surveying capabilities of our geospatial product, called Trimble GeoMax Office. “One of the first things Trimble kicked off after acquiring Spectra Precision was the Trimble Business Center platform,” says Sharp.
At that time, Trimble already had a model called TerraModel, which was a full-blown CAD civil suite.
It did a lot of the calculations for building site models for machine control. When Trimble acquired Spectra Precision in 2000, that company had software called PayDirt, which was a PC-based takeoff program. “I’m not sure what traditional takeoff means anymore since most contractors are using some automated means of calculating amounts for takeoffs,” says Alan Sharp, business area director–CEC Software Solutions at Trimble Navigation Ltd. Performing takeoffs involves gathering a lot of information quickly, automated processes, and repetitive math, so it is no wonder that digital takeoffs have been part of the DNA of construction companies for a long time.
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