sketchy design

[KeesW]

How do others create sketchy designs with Archicad? In the days of freehand drawing, we could create unfinished, but representative illustrations that captured the 'feel' or essence of what we wanted to create without solving all the design problems. This is very hard to do with CAD. Archicad (and other software) requires definite starting and finishing points for lines and building elements. 2D drafting requires this for plans but 3D makes it worse by also demanding resolution of vertical dimensions. As a result, 'sketchy' drawings look rigid and resolved when they aren't. I use ArchiSketchy to mask this but it only partially does this.

Maybe I should go back to freehand tracing over CAD created plans and elevations - using artistic licence and guesswork to complete the bits that are yet be decided.

KeesW

[Petros Ioannou]

Sometimes you can use the internal sketch rendering engine which gives some pretty rough results and you can also do some processing inside photoshop.
There is also Piranesi which I am not familiar with but from what I've seen it can achieve what you want (blurring some areas for example).

Petros

[KeesW]

Thanks Petros,

Post processing is OK -I use ArchiSketch amd have looked at the internal sketch engine. A more important issue, however, is that 3D CAD requires me to spend time (and money) on design issues that don't yet need to be resolved in order to produce a drawing.

Kees

[Petros Ioannou]

This will always be a problem with CAD since it requires input of data that usually aren't available at early stages of a project.
So even though sketch-engines or sketch-applications create something visually similar to a hand-drawn sketch the concept behind is different:
A hand-drawn sketch can be translated into many different architectural solutions while a computer drawn sketch is the result of a single solution.

Petros

PS.This is why I always have in my pocket my 3mm-6B lead Caran D'ache pencil!

[Anonymous]

SketchUp is a great program for creating preliminary design sketches, and it's not grossly expensive either. It allows you to quickly generate 3D and 2D sketch type drawings, and has no learning curve at all. It might be worth checking into.

www.sketchup.com

HTH,
Dan

[Erika Epstein]

Petros wrote:
A hand-drawn sketch can be translated into many different architectural solutions while a computer drawn sketch is the result of a single solution.

Petros

Beautifully stated