New ArchiCAD Tutorial - creating "material schemes"

[Eric Bobrow]

Hi -

I just created a new 14 minute video showing how you can create, save and restore different "material schemes" on the fly while working on your design in ArchiCAD:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfA0ODKCLOY

This question came up recently in one of the coaching calls that I do with members of the Best Practices Course. "How can I save different versions of the materials for a project, so that I can switch quickly between them?"

I came up with a clever way to use Attribute Manager that makes this very easy. It's so quick, you can swap materials virtually instantly while you sit with your client. Watch this and see how you can do it.

Please let me know what you think. If you like the video and find the ideas useful, please post a comment on the video page and click the "Like" button.

Best regards,
Eric

P.S. If you like this tutorial, please subscribe to my channel for more free ArchiCAD tutorials!

[Karl Ottenstein]

Eric wrote:
I came up with a clever way to use Attribute Manager that makes this very easy.

Technique reported here many times over the years. Re-invention is always a nice thing though. 😉

Great that you're creating and providing these free tutorials, Eric! I hope people get to the last minute of this video since you don't make it clear prior to that that the re-definition of non-general materials is a bad practice.

(Material definition is actually a time consuming affair with many settings for both internal/opengl and lightworks - showing how to copy an existing well-defined material onto a general material using Attribute Manager is an omitted but essential step.)

Cheers,
Karl

[Eric Bobrow]

Thanks Karl for the important note about not redefining non-general materials.

Can you explain how one can copy an existing well-defined material onto a general material using Attribute Manager? When one overwrites, the index stays the same; when one appends, the index goes to the first available number (as far as I know). In neither case can one control the process to modify a particular general material.

By the way - is that an oxymoron - "particular general"?

Anyway, all kidding aside - do you have a way to do that little trick - copying settings from one indexed material to another index in the list? I'd love to learn it!

Eric

[Link]

I think it's all covered in this (amateurishly produced) tip:

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=1803

Posted in 2004!

Cheers,
Link.

[Eric Bobrow]

Thank you Link for sharing your clever way to work around to this frustrating limitation of the ArchiCAD attribute system.

(And for cleverly working around the limitations on attachments allowed in the ArchiCAD-Talk forum by making multiple posts, each with a JPG page image showing one step in the process!)

Perhaps you could recreate this tip with current screen-capture tools and turn this into a short video tutorial. I think that people might appreciate it, and it would make it easier to access this little gem.

Eric