In Revit you can schedule floor areas and estimate material quantities required for construction.  However, if you want to optimize quantities and placement of building supplies to reduce waste that might not be enough. Pricing estimates might not be accurate either.

To resolve this problem, I wanted to draw each plywood sheet and dry-wall sheet in place so I can get optimal positionning and precise quantities to be ordered. But what if we don’t want to affect the drawing plans? Here is a solution that worked for me, it may work for you as well.

 The concept:

Take advantage of building phases and phase filtering for views.

Example:

1. Add a project Phase at the very end of the list.  Call it “Building Supply Take Off” or something like that:

   

2. Duplicate a floor plan View and assign it to the newly created Phase:

   
   

3. In the newly created view, draw your construction supplies as if you where installing them in reality. Make sure they are also set to the  Phase we created previously. 

   In this case, I inserted 2′ x 8′ panels representing styrofoam insulation. I don’t really have to care about intersections as this is just something used to extract quantities and they will never appear on printed drawings anyways.

   

4. Finally, create a schedule that also filters entities for the “Building Supply Take Off” Phase.