Erika wrote:
Would you care to elaborate on 'all right' and 'good'?
What worked and didn't work well and why?
Sorry for the delay, all that stuff about eggnog and not...
As I have signed an NDA about those works, so unfortunately I can not really get into details for now.
The new Vico Office is very different from the former VICO suite, which included a modeler (Constructor).
Now you import the model into VICO and do all the linking there. It is a very graphical interface, where you can do a lot of interesting things:
- Assign resources to elements, filtered by id's or layers.
- Assign resources manually to specific elements, or even specific surfaces of elements (imagine a Zone that has different wall finishes).
- Alter one modeling tool into another (for instance, model it with zones, transform them into slabs).
-Highlight and filter elements.
This is done with a 3d model, on a window very much like Solibri's.
I am guessing that this could be really a new way for us designers to extract quantities (besides ArchiCAD's schedules and Cigraph's ArchiQuant).
We imported the architecture of the Hospital into VICO (2200 rooms) with doors, windows, walls and zones, and it was ok, fast to import, and quick on it's feet to do the linking. Will see what happens with all the data from MEP though, which will be modeled with ArchiCAD as an independent model (or more than one model).
VICO is Windows only, but from what I have seen (I am not the one doing the linking, just the modeling) this is being done on laptops, so there are no supercomputers behind it.
My guess is, if your computer can model it, then it will handle the model in VICO easily.
There are a lot of interesting considerations you have to take into account when modeling, not only to minimize the file (simplifying geometry, splitting models) but also to make the linking easier and more fail safe.
These seem to me as being really the secret ingredient: Organization. Modeling for construction is VERY different from modeling for design documentation, as I have been learning (sometimes the hard way).