Managing Design Options

Anonymous — Tue, 23 May 2023 12:27:05 GMT

Hello all,
One thing that has always been difficult and a little clumsy is managing design options while working in Archicad. I am sure I am not the only one who has a frustrations with this, so i was wondering if anyone has a confident approach to this. I'll try and lay out some scenarios.

1. Schematic Design phase- Whole building design options, massing studies, or maybe material choices.

or

2. When pretty deep in a Construction Documents phase, sometimes the client (or simply our inhouse design team) may ask for a redesign of a certain area. In this case we'd like to keep the Construction Documents intact as much as possible, while trying to explore different design options.

Of course, one way to handle this would be to create new layers for each option (a-wall-option 3, or a-roof-option 2, or a-kitchen-option 2). This gets clumsy quickly when you're creating multiple layer options for multiple elements. Not to mention having to potentially creating new layer combinations.

Another would be to somehow manipulate the Renovation Filter feature somehow, but i haven't wrapped my head around this.

Another would be to copy and paste bits of the model and work completely separate from the model. i don't like this because i'd like to keep as much in the main model as possible.

Another would be to somehow use hotlink modules and their master layers to cycle between options. Again, haven't figured this one out yet.

I'm really just brainstorming and looking for some intelligent approaches that we can incorporate as a standard practice in our office. We use archicad 17 and 18, and we work on a wide variety of projects ranging from small retail and hospitality projects to large base building projects. Almost all in teamwork.

Thanks in advance!
-mb

topic Managing Design Options in Modeling

Managing Design Options