gpowless wrote:
It is only the occasional building with canted or curved walls where flexible floor plan cuts come into play. The rest of the time most of us can get by with the standard floor plan views.
The reality is that we need to produce construction drawings as the meat and potatoes of our business. Right now design represents about 30% of my time while detailing and printing represent about 70%. I say we Graphisoft needs to work on productivity improvements in a similar proportion to the design improvements.
Has anyone considered the time that will be necessary to document those fancy wall profiles in 2d drawings? I understand that being able to produce such beautiful concepts is a bonus but I would also suggest that documenting may very well be another nightmare to communicate and construct.
Who's talking about "fancy" wall profiles and "beautiful concepts? I'm asking about basic day-to-day details like Cornices, Mouldings, Handrails, Roof faschia board treatments, that may happen to occur at parts of the building that curve like BAYS, BALCONIES, or, oh I don't know, CURVED walls? Or we not allowed to design those with ArchiCAD in our buildings? I ask aquestion about a feature that was already in ArchiCAD 9.0 ( it's called Profiler in your goodies add-on folder) which just happened not to work very well at the above mentioned situations, and suddenly everybody goes into defensive mode claiming that no one wants to design Frank Gehry buildings. I'm not asking about designing Frank Gehry-type buildings! I'm asking about designing and documenting features and parts of buildings I work on everyday, and which up till this point ( and for the forseeable future it seems) I've had to rely on clunky work-arounds. Yes, the 3ds importer is fine, but considering the fact that it crashes the program when you import large objects, it's not very useful beyond a certain level. Maxonform is good, but do we really have to essentially learn another program (C4D) to get stuff done in ArchiCAD that ought to be basic functionality? I guess that would be in keeping with GS philosphy of having the users acquire completely new skills (GDL scripting and programming, anyone?) which are at the same time completely unrelated to architecture just to get our basic day-to-day stuff done.
gpowless wrote:
It is only the occasional building with canted or curved walls where flexible floor plan cuts come into play. The rest of the time most of us can get by with the standard floor plan views.
If YOU don't need certain functions to work or work well for you because it doesn't affect your day-to-day work, then congratulations for you, you must be pleased as Punch. But just because "most of us can get by with the standard floor plan views", as you put it, doesn't mean that the rest of us who have come to expect GS to improve on their modelling tools ( because they said they would, no less) should be expected to put up and shut up when they don't deliver and it affects OUR work.
So enjoy your ArchiCAD 10, as it obviously seems to address all your design and daily needs, but don't presume to speak for me, or others who may happen to believe GS when they say they are committed to improving their modelling tools, and not rely so much on add-ons and plugins (like Maxonform or ArchiForma) with future releases, when we happen to ask GS what happened with requested improvements that they said were forthcoming.
