Often it requires to prepare the material take off for structures. In order to fulfill this requirement, it will be helpful if there are functions to retrieve the following information:
Unfactored weights of
Sections and,
Plates
I believe there are no functions to achieve this at present especially to retrieve the weights of a selected set of plates. In general, waiting for the analysis and design to complete before producing the MTO may not be effective because the section properties and plate thicknesses are already assigned and available in the model. The user should be able to retrieve this information independent of the availability of analysis results.
Thank you for posting this idea. You should see that there has already been a posting on this topic, https://staad-brand.ideas.aha.io/ideas/SP-I-328, Immediate Steel Take Off. If you check there, I have posted a macro that achieves this for beams objects. You can take that and develop it further for plates.