BIM/ ARCHICAD TRAINING - What to do when there is a lull?

[rob2218]

Well, I'm finding myself "looking" (feverishly) for something BIM related to do in our office.

I've been told here that in D.C., the winters are "strange" sometimes with regards to work.

Sometimes there's LOTS of work and sometimes there are LULL's in the work load.....we are currently experiencing the LULL in the work load.

So...I'm trying to come up with IDEAS from all you AC BIM Managers out there as to what to do with my newly found time that could benifit the office....be it either Template file (of which I'm doing right now), training, manual creation, agenda development...etc....I'm desparate for suggestions folks.....don't want my employer to even think of uttering the words..."hey, Rob, uhhh. yeah..why don't you take some time...........(I won't even say it)"........so any help would greatly be appreciated.

[JaredBanks]

Template of course is a big one. How about researching and developing ways to be smarter architects? As in finding ways ArchiCAD can create added services or better insight into design.

How many 3D views or color views are showing up in your drawing sets? Could you explore the next step in schedules or autotext usage? Are you doing renderings already? Can you lower the base point when you can start producing quality visualization graphics? What about movies?

Does your office use Ecodesigner? Might be a good time to start looking into that.

Are there objects you could create or find to make your models better?

Time to learn GDL?

This happens to be on my mind tonight too!

[rob2218]

Thanks Jared,
All very good suggestions....of which I may just use a few of them.

I found last week a website called "www.learnvirtual.com"...they do have GDL online courses in their curriculum. Seems (farely) reasonable....so I may just visit this site and sign up.

We are using 3D views in our CD's. You'd be surprised how many subs and contractors continually refer back to the 3D drawings when they need to discuss "issues" on the construction site.

templates...yes working feverishly on this one. Have everything nailed down cept...Pensets and Layers (combo's and layer naming).

[JaredBanks]

Have you spent any time reading http://web.me.com/karpenglish/RabbitHole/HOME.html Erich hasn't updated it in a while, but there's some good GDL lessons there.

Also I think there are some places to download the GDL cookbook for free, I seem to recall a post about that on the forum a while ago.