Making the Jump to Archicad

[Anonymous]

Hello To All,

I’m new to this forum and about to start experimenting with archicad. Let me give you a little background information. I have a new position, as a project manager, with a high end residential architectural firm that focuses on shingle style and historical preservation work. It is a small firm of 5 people. Three of us are working with autocad LT. The owner of the company hired me to manage his projects from design development through construction docs and though construction administration. He also wants me to develop a set of office and cad standards. Here’s where I’m going. We have two seats for archicad 7. The owner has given me the go ahead to use it. He does not want to upgrade to v10 and does not want to get another seat for a total of three.

What would be the best way to transition in to archicad? How could I use the 2 seats and juggle in autocad? Can it happen? If it can should I focus on establish a strong conversion template?

My thoughts are for me to get familiar with the program and start introducing it in small projects. Then if I start modeling larger projects I could export out to autocad and let the other cad folks detail it up.

I have experience with revit and familiar with BIM. My other concern is the length of time it would take to create an extremely detailed high end residential model and a set of construction document from it?

Does anybody have any images of residential projects with ornamental detailing?

Thanks in advance and I look forward to the future with AC.

[Anonymous]

It looks to me that you have a serious problem on your hands. To make the transition from AutoCAD to true building modeling takes a serious commitment from the top management. The owner's unwillingness to upgrade to AC10 suggests that there is no such commitment.

The only thing I can suggest would be to talk the owner into buying one upgrade to AC10 and picking a project for you to do start to finish (without recourse to AutoCAD) as a pilot. There is really very little point to working with ArchiCAD 7. While many of us did some very good work with it back in 2001-2002 it is very far behind what is possible in AC10 and the time you put into the process is worth much more than the upgrade cost.