We had a good turn out last week for our 9th Minnesota ArchiCAD Usergroup. To celebrate a full year of meetings we had pizza (thanks, Graphisoft). We covered a lot of topics at this meeting. Many of them–like Solid Element Operations, two recent projects I’m working on, pen sets, complex profiles, and template development–deserve their own blog posts. So here are a few of the topics that we discussed that are more compact:

Someone in the group had been having an issue opening dwgs from ArchiCAD in SketchUp. It turns out that he was publishing the dwgs from Layout Book and not the View Map. The added information of the layout made SketchUp cranky (i.e., it wouldn’t open the file). Once he exported directly from the view map everything worked fine.

We looked at some of the object improvements in v14 (or at least since v11 which is what I’m comparing v14 to). Doors, windows, stoves, range hood, etc. all have a variety of tweaks. For a residential designer that has had to build a lot of custom hoods, it’s nice to see a more evolved object. I imagine there are similar changes to the objects that show up more in commercial projects. I encourage everyone to relook at the objects, even ones you might regard as useless from a previous version. I’ve been doing this and have been pleasantly surprised. The library still has holdovers from v11 and earlier, but there is plenty to be happy about. We also discussed the improvements to the cabinetry objects. In contrast to my previous views on how to model cabinetry, I’m forcing myself to use the actual cabinetry objects in v14 for at least one or two projects. At 1/4″ for plans and in the model views, I’m happy with them. I’m only in SD on the one project I’ve used them, so I’ve yet to see them in an interior elevation drawing at 3/8″ or 1/2″ = 1′-0″. But at this junction, I think I might be changing my views on cabinetry (at least for straight forward cabinets).

The improved dimensioning over the past few versions was another interesting topic. No longer having to specify X, Y, or angled dimensions (this goes back to either v12 or v13) and the ability to add text to the measured dimension (set to custom and make sure you have <MeasuredValue> in your custom text) are great, but the tool has been further revised. At least as far back as version 8.1 one could add to a dimension string using command+click. But this function was not obvious; I didn’t learn about this until I’d been using ArchiCAD for two years. Now there’s an option in the pet palette (left button, first row). This clarity will be great for new users. There are two other new buttons in the pet palette (sorry if these are from v13, I’ve mostly skipped v12 and v13). To realign the dimension string to be parallel to a give line, use the middle button, first row; this will make angled dimensions so much easier to verify they are properly aligned. And finally the right button in the first row of the pet palette allows you to graphically change the witness line.

Dimension Tool Pet Palette