Massing?

[Anonymous]

A fellow coworker has come from a Revit/Architectural Desktop background and is "beside himself" that Archicad does not have a massing tool. He asked how we would do massing or a massing study and I told him we have to model walls, slabs, etc. Is there a better way to do this? Will there ever be a "shape" or massing tool you can extrude, like in Sketchup or something? Archicad is kind of lacking here...

I would like to hear the general opinion on this.

[Anonymous]

My thought is to adapt the Zone tool for this purpose. Some other functionality is also missing from the zone tool, but adding the sketchup push pull functionality would go a long way.

[sinceV6]

Yeah. ArchiCAD lacks a bit here. But you should think of the toolbox as tools, not as the name implies: walls, slabs, roofs and now shells are amazing tools that can be used in different ways.

Wall tool -> vertical elements that can be slanted and don't have to go only to the next floor. Slabs -> can also extend several floors and can be faster to adjust for massing. Etc.

For massing, I've used Zones, Slabs, Walls, and even the Basic Shapes objects included. They all work great.

Just because there is no "Conceptual massing environment" button doesn't mean you can't do massing in a simple way, without setting floor levels, making proper walls, slabs etc. You already have an integrated massing environment. Rethink the toolset.

Best regards.

[Anonymous]

Has anyone had luck bringing Sketchup models into Archicad?