Please excuse my rather off-putting and unconstructive rant in the previous message.
tekton23 wrote:
Hi,What is considered best practice now and is there a way to coordinate this with the information produced by Archicad?
I'd be interested to hear what you have found the best process to be?
ARCHICAD is, after all, a BIM aplication, so it does allow you to produce a fully coordinated BIM model. This means that you can easily get it to calculate quantities and all the related info you need if you approach it right.
It is difficult to give you specific advice on how to approach this without knowing what exactly you would like to accomplish (PM me if you need some advice specific to your practice), but the main direction is simple — you can get ARCHICAD to do whatever you need. The question is how.
ARCHICAD has two major areas related to specification process (you can see them in your Project Map tree).
Schedules (or Interactive Schedules, as they are referred to in the manual) are a newer and much-better-supported tool for displaying/calculating/editing
model-based
quantities.
"Model-based" means quantities you can directly acquire from the model (for example, you can count how many times a specific object was used in your project; or you can get area/volume of a brick wall in square/cubic meters,
but not
the amount of bricks, sand, concrete and metal ties you need per cubic meter of volume of that wall).
Schedules are very well supported, easy to use and require little training (short of ubiquitous BIM-related approach constrains, but that is another story).
Lists are a very old specification system, that I mentioned in a post above, dating back to 2004.
Now, Lists are the coolest thing since sliced bread and, to my knowledge, no other BIM software on the market has it built-in in a way ARCHICAD does.
Lists is what you use to get the number of bricks, volume of sand, bags of concrete, or man-hours, kWt of energy or anything else you might think of in relation to some "model-based" property. For example, you might want to make a specification that states "
1,57 kilograms of stucco finish material per square meter of this wall's surface; shaken, not stirred" and ARCHICAD will dynamically keep track of all the numbers and text notes for you, even if the specific wall surface is modified in any way.
Lists are not very user friendly, but are totally awesome when setup and debugged properly.
As I mentioned in my post above, understanding and implementing Schedules and Lists properly (together with BIM server/cloud and BIMx) is a sure way to a 100% client conversion rate for any architectural practice.
