Auto Take-Off

Shade Area
Left-click a blank area on an imported image to fill that area with grey, thus flagging it as a room.

Measure will attempt to detect walls based on the color difference between them and the lighter background of the blueprint. If an area on the blueprint is not fully enclosed with distinct boundaries, shading can spill over to surrounding areas. Use the Barrier feature to negate this.

Tip: Hold down the left mouse button and drag the cursor for a continuous fill. This can be useful on blueprints with a great deal of text or other noise that Measure may interpret as room boundaries.

Remove Area
Right-click a shaded area to remove it.

Create Barrier
Hold down the Ctrl button, then click once to set the start point for a barrier and a second time to set the end point. Barriers appear on the drawing as red lines. Since they are only used in conjunction with the Auto Take-Off tool, they are removed after the "Create Room(s)" function is invoked.

Barriers are used to limit the extent to which an area is shaded. In the accompanying image, the door swing indicator has prevented a portion of the bedroom from being covered. A barrier is placed in the doorway so that area can be shaded without it spilling over into the hall.

Create Room(s)
Click the "Create Rooms(s)" button or press Enter to convert the shaded areas into rooms.

Areas that are solidly shaded, without any breaks, are generated as a single room. An example of this can be seen in the accompanying image. Because there were no walls or barriers between the bedroom and closet it was generated as a single room. If a barrier had been added in the doorway between them, they would have been rendered as two separate rooms.

Ignore Features Smaller Than
Define a maximum size for features that should be ignored when they are surrounded by shading.

In the accompanying image, this option was set to match the thickness of the major interior walls. The result is that even though the walls between the bedroom and closet were not shaded, they were still included in the area of the room because their width was less than the size entered in this field.

Snap Wall Angles to Multiples of
This setting controls how angles are handled by the auto take-off function. The default value of 5 causes all angles to be drawn at multiples of 5 degrees, a value of 90 would force only right angles, and so on.

Note: If an entire room is at a non-right angle, the system will use the dominant direction of the room as the basis from which the angle snapping occurs.

After Creating Room, Expand Room
When the "Create Room(s)" function is used, all rooms will expand by the amount entered in this field.

Boundary Line
This box displays a sample of the line weight and opacity Measure will search for while detecting room boundaries.

Sample Boundary
Manually select a portion of wall from the imported blueprint and Measure will set its Boundary Line settings to match. After activating this tool, draw a small box around the sample wall by clicking once to set box's first corner and a second time at the opposite corner.

Expand/Collapse Boundary Options This button controls whether or not the Weight (pixels) and Grey Level options are visible.

Weight (pixels)
Indicate how wide, in pixels, the boundaries on the imported image are.

Grey Level
Slider that controls the opacity of the boundary lines Measure will search for. Slide to the left for a darker line.