Although the meeting was focused on new users, there were some great questions and discussions that have value for all users. As in most of our meetings, a fair amount of time was spent discussing complex profiles. For anyone who’s not using complex profiles to their breaking point: get to it! Scott Newland shared a project and showed off some of the ways he was using them. One example, using 2 complex profiles, was a very elegant solution for an existing chimney on a house in Texas he’s remodeling. Also in the Texas project was an example of merging multiple documents and file types into ArchiCAD. On the title sheet was a linked PDF from Word, a Google map, and renderings from ArchiCAD. One could easily extrapolate that out further to more linked documents. A linked PDF from Excel or even AutoCAD would be just as easy. It was very nice for new users to see how easy it is to pull information from other places. Scott’s file also had an example of a great trick for showing roads and paths in mesh sites (Eric Bobrow did a video about this back in November–You can and should watch the video). I’ve used the trick a few times and it’s a huge time saver (I wish I knew about this trick in June when I was modeling the locations of designated wetlands in a very complex site).

We also spent a lot of time talking about various visualization topics. We explored the sketch rendering engine and compared various options within it. I showed about a half dozen different quick renderings of the same image, each with different sketch settings. These renderings were then compared to a 3D document of a similar view. A nice thing about the 3D document is the ability to copy and paste the model, creating a 2D copy of it. I’ve found this copy is nice because it allows for easy clean up–probably an intermediate solution. With a combination of better modeling and more careful creation of the 3D document, I’m sure exploding to 2D could be avoided. Currently I’ve only used the 3D document on one project, so I’m very new to it.

I also demonstrated an easy way to get a rendered plan with shadows. This was done using cut planes and an axonometric top down view. Since it’s a 3D view, it can be rendered in everything from lightworks to a sketch engine. I’ve yet to do it, but one could also make a 3D document from this view, thus allowing dimensions, text, etc. Prior to the 3D document, one had to place the rendered view on top of a regular plan view in Photoshop or Illustrator. A search on the ArchiCAD forum should lead to a bunch of good posts about this topic. I forgot to mention in the meeting that a similar plan with detailed materials could be created using image fills.

Both pen sets and materials were also discussed. Multiple pen sets are very important; I have another blog post coming up on that, so I’ll save my preaching for then. I used a recent cabin project to demonstrate the usefulness of smart material assignments. Materials should be assigned early and schematically. One doesn’t need to know what material the exterior walls will be–only that they should be assigned a unique material. So from the moment you draw your first wall on a project, assign it a material that can become the final material. Don’t make every wall, window, roof, and trim piece surface (white). Start the differentiation early. Assign a unique material to windows; even if you think it’s going to be wood, don’t use the same wood you assign to the trellis or the baseboard. If your exterior walls all start out as C01, then C01 can become Brick or Lap Siding or used to select only those walls and then divided into two groups – C01 and a new material. This leads to a larger issue of slicing a model. Again an issue that deserves it’s own blog post. The gist of it is this: know how to use find and select. Be able to refine your search to be amazingly specific. Use both the plus and the minus button.

The meeting ended with me showing an example of a walk through of a small cabin created in Virtual Building Explorer. It’s the first project I’ve used Virtual Building Explorer on. I’ve since sent the files to the clients and they were able to open the file and explore the project at there leisure. I’m very excited to be able to more easily share the model with the client. I’ve put a lot of time into building a robust model to do documents, so it’s nice to let other people spend time in there as well. If anyone is interested in seeing the walk through, let me know and I can e-mail it to you.