How to Extract Areas in SketchUp?

Unfortunately, the link to bim.bon is no longer active. We have kept this post as a historical record of how the tool worked when it was published. References to the service and its free availability belong to that period and do not confirm current availability.

Picture yourself in the following situation: you're planning a renovation, and you'd like to know how much you'll spend on flooring for the living room. To do that, you need information like the price of the material to be used and the floor area of the room, right?

You can get the area of a face very easily in SketchUp: just select the desired face and look at the Entity Info (Entity Info) window, as in fig. 01. Simple, right?

Fig. 01 – When a face is selected, its area appears in the Entity Info window.

NOTE 1: Remember that you can change the working units in the Model Info (Model Info) window, in case they're not set to the unit you want, as in fig. 02.

Fig. 02 – In the Units tab, you can choose the most convenient working unit.

NOTE 2: If you'd like to know how to get volumes of solids, we explain how to do it here.

Now imagine you want to apply flooring to more than one floor (or, in the model's case, more than one face), like bedrooms. A practical way to solve this — and simpler than selecting each face and adding up their areas — is to use a material. In this example, we'll apply a material called Ladrilho hidráulico (fig. 03).

Fig. 03 – Once created, the Ladrilho hidráulico material appears in the In Model tab of the Materials window.

After applying the material to the floor faces, getting the total area is very simple: just go to the Materials (Materials) window, right-click the Ladrilho hidráulico material, choose the Area (Area) option (figs. 04 and 05), and voilà!

Fig. 04 – Right-click the desired material and choose the Area option.

Fig. 05 – The window displays the total area where this material is applied in the model.

Imagine how much faster it becomes to put together a finishes schedule for a multi-story building? And this applies to materials on any type of surface — floors, walls, ceilings — just apply the desired material and repeat the steps to get its area.

If you want to go further when doing quantity takeoffs using SketchUp, there are extremely powerful tools available — and the best part: they're free. Try bim.bon.

 

What if you could calculate volumes in SketchUp?

Like the idea? We have an article here explaining how to do it!

Would you like to deepen your knowledge of modeling and organizing projects in SketchUp? Explore EBBIM’s Curso SketchUp Pro do Básico ao Avançado. The training covers modeling sites and buildings, components, materials and scenes, complementing the topic of this post.