Archicad 14 New Features

[Dennis Lee]

See what's on youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/user/Archicad#g/c/5C1926DD91A70C7B

Personally, not much in it for me at all!

[rjwilden]

Hi all,
As a one person office, I want to tell GS developers how I collaborate with my engineer.
- In the developed drawing and construction doc stage . I mostly use "cmd shift 4" Mac, take a screen shot of the area in question,. Drag the image off my desk top into mail, suggest my prefered solution. Steve my engineer emails me back with Yes thats fine and may make some suggestions.
At the most he scribbles some notes on the printed PDF and emails them Back to me
At the end of the job I send a PDF of the whole thing, and he issues a certificate. I do residential and light industrial.
How GS can improve on this I dont know. Im not sure my engineer can even use autocad. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Even if he did use revit or similar. It would not make me do it any other way.

Richard Wilden


Richard





Don't you know that small design companies exchange data with small engineering practices, and small engineering practices only use Autocad in 2D???"

[Erich]

Krippahl wrote:
For my part I will wait for the release, work with it or see it at work, then form an opinion.

Whoa now! no sensible positions!

[Laszlo Nagy]

Hi Richard,
I understand your point.
In my experience, there is a point from which it is worth using BIM.
In Hungary, you cannot earn a lot of money by designing residential buildings. I mean you get maybe 2-3-4 percent... And they are not willing to pay for Construction Documents, only Building Permit.
So building a full BIM Model does not pay off in such cases for us.

But there are other types of projects, middle, large and huge.
The bigger the project, the greater the importance of BIM and collaboration.
The method you write about just does not work above a certain project size. Or it takes a lot of time and energy and BIM collaboration will beat it.

This is true for today.
But it is possible that in the future even smaller projects will need to be done in BIM as the competition increases and other offices doing BIM will just simply be able to do a job more efficiently and for less. The world seems to be moving in that direction as far as I can see.

[Anonymous]

Erich wrote:

Krippahl wrote:
For my part I will wait for the release, work with it or see it at work, then form an opinion.

Whoa now! no sensible positions!

First I have to understand, for instance, what "Improved Schedule Interactions" and "Faster Generation of Schedules" taken from http://www.graphisoft.com/products/archicad/faq.html#whatsnew really are.
Working with schedules is a substancial part of my work, so if this improvements mean what I think they mean, it will make a big impact on my workflow.
Which means, I have to wait and see, and then form an opinion. Is this wrong?

[Dennis Lee]

Steve wrote:

Dennis wrote:
pic 2

There is certainly not anything in these models that I can't model with ArchiCAD. What is the point of the pictures?

How many percent of Archicad users do you think can model this kind of stuff? Even if you can, how many complex profiles do you have to make? How many SEO's do you have to do? How many 3d views must you set before saving as GDL part? How many layer intersection groups do you have to adjsut to make sure they don't have unintended clean up of complex profile walls? And then multiply this by the number of custom stone shapes in this project? And what if that shape had to change?
If at the same time you actually had to "design" this, how does your brain have enough room left over after sorting out all those steps to even think about the design aspect?
If we had a easier modeling tool, we can actually think about design, rather than how to use roofs, complex profiles, invisible layers and such to make one specific form.

Frankly, after using AC for 4 years +, I still would have a hard time modeling this sort of stuff.

[Dennis Lee]

Krippahl wrote:
I can´t say that those pictures impress me. Any modeling tool can do them, even Sketchup.

I don't know what you mean by "even Sketchup". If AC had the modeling tools like Sketchup I think nobody will complain about AC's modeling tools for a long long time.

[Anonymous]

rjwilden wrote:
In the developed drawing and construction doc stage . I mostly use "cmd shift 4" Mac, take a screen shot of the area in question,. Drag the image off my desk top into mail, suggest my prefered solution. Steve my engineer emails me back with Yes thats fine and may make some suggestions.
At the most he scribbles some notes on the printed PDF and emails them Back to me "

HAha Richard. We must use the same engineer in Dunedin . Thats exactly what I do and is very fast. The amazing thing is, is that I use Revit and he has no problems viewing my Screen caps

Phillip

[Laszlo Nagy]

Dennis,
Your example is interesting but how consider many of such and similar projects do most architects do.
I remember a thread 2-3 years ago on the Talk where the consensus was that these fancy free-form modelling tools and complex forms are really not needed by 80-90 % of architects - they just don't do those kinds of thing in real projects.

Plus, do you have any information about how much time it took to do that gothic stuff in whichever project? I am sure it took a lot of time, no matter the program used. It was not half an hour, that's for sure.
Creating complex geometry is time-consuming.

[Anonymous]

Dennis wrote:

Steve wrote:

Dennis wrote:
pic 2

There is certainly not anything in these models that I can't model with ArchiCAD. What is the point of the pictures?

How many percent of Archicad users do you think can model this kind of stuff? Even if you can, how many complex profiles do you have to make? How many SEO's do you have to do? How many 3d views must you set before saving as GDL part? How many layer intersection groups do you have to adjsut to make sure they don't have unintended clean up of complex profile walls? And then multiply this by the number of custom stone shapes in this project? And what if that shape had to change?
If at the same time you actually had to "design" this, how does your brain have enough room left over after sorting out all those steps to even think about the design aspect?
If we had a easier modeling tool, we can actually think about design, rather than how to use roofs, complex profiles, invisible layers and such to make one specific form.

Frankly, after using AC for 4 years +, I still would have a hard time modeling this sort of stuff.

And you think out of school Revit user can do it?
I work in Revit too. Modeling this example in Revit was not a walk in the park.
How many views modeler had to create to make it? This is my question. Theoretically you can model whatever you want in Revit , but in practice sometimes you have a problem making a wall on a proper angle to another wall. And this modeling is not a walk in the park. You can't even find middle between two points (something old Autocad can). How many additional detail lines had to be done?
A lot of work this one was.

[Dennis Lee]

Miki and Laszlo, I know it probably took a lot of effort and time in Revit as well. I've evaluated Revit before too, and I still prefer ArchiCAD overall for my work (especially since my two hands have become completely used to working in ArchiCAD).

I just see the lack of an intuitive form building tool / environment the biggest drawback of AC, and am hugely disappointed that they totally ignored this aspect of the program (again).