Winter Usergroup meetings in Minnesota are an adventure–snow, ice, sub-zero temperatures. I’m always so glad to see a mixture of new and old faces make the trip. This month, even with a location snafu, we had about 1/3 newcomers. Below are some highlights. There’s plenty more that we covered (complex profiles, attribute manager, library updates in v14, among other topics), but this post is already my longest to date.

I walked everyone through the steps of doing a material takeoff, based on the AECBytes article I mentioned in this earlier post. The process of setting up the materials and extracting the information is unbelievably simple. There are definitely some finer points I need to learn about, streamline, and fit into how I work at SALA Architects. But the hardest part about it has nothing to do with ArchiCAD. I don’t know much about material takeoffs. I need to learn. After reading the AECBytes article, anyone can follow the steps. Need to know the number of studs @ 24″ O.C. in a wall? Set the component you build to count .5 studs per foot. It’s pretty much that simple. Great now I can figure out the number of studs in all my designs. But wait. Is .5 the right number? Maybe it should be .55 studs per foot. Perhaps it’s really .8 studs per foot once you account for openings, plates, double studs, jack studs, king studs, overbuilt corners, etc. I don’t know. The point being, while material takeoffs are way more straightforward in ArchiCAD than I ever imagined, they’re only as accurate and smart as I am. My models are good. So they’re not the weak link. I am. I need to learn about estimating and use my model to improve my assumptions. And then use my assumptions to improve my model. Any contractors in Minnesota want work with me on this? Even if I modeled every stick and sheet in the building, that presumes I am right to place all those studs and boards correctly. Which I promise you I wouldn’t. And besides modern life is built on estimating and extrapolating data, not absolute knowledge (we don’t actually count every person to get a global population or count every star in the night sky).

In the spirit of schedules, lists, and takeoffs, I also showed everyone how to make a quick plumbing schedule from scratch. That was fun, especially because I’d never technically done it before! But I think the need for schedules like that is creeping closer and closer in my own work. A good start would be to use ArchiCAD to coordinate all the owner provided furniture and fixtures. Why not use ArchiCAD to keep track of that stuff and make sure it fits in the design? The schedule might not show up on the final drawings, but it would improve coordination during the design process. This conversation also made me realize I need to improve and update my window and door schedules. They’re both based on my v9 workflow. Outdated is an understatement.

We spent some time talking about gravity. ArchiCAD gravity, not real gravity. Gravity in ArchiCAD allows objects to intelligently be placed on the top of what’s below them. Doing a visualization model and want to put a vase of flowers on the kitchen island? Turn on gravity. Adding toilets, cabinets, and furniture to a half story? Turn on gravity. That’s actually how our discussion of gravity started: someone asked about the best way to do half stories. General consensus was to put 2 half stories on the same ArchiCAD story so that they show up easily on the same sheet. Putting half stories on different ArchiCAD stories creates more trouble than it’s worth.

Everyone also shared where they find objects online. At least one person in our group has had a lot of success with Google 3D Warehouse. He downloads the objects, saves them in SketchUp as a .3ds file and then opens the .3ds file in ArchiCAD. From his experience the objects come into ArchiCAD very clean and usable. I’m going to experiment with this as well. It’d be great to find some free SketchUp trees that work well in ArchiCAD. I very much look forward to a stronger SketchUp/ArchiCAD connection. And the project I’m working on between late February and late June will require that I interface with SketchUp a lot. So in the coming months I’m going to learn a lot more about working between the two programs. I’ve already had success with exporting a mesh that I created from a .dwg site plan into SketchUp via a .3ds file. The contoured site was also begun by someone else in SketchUp. It took less than 45 minutes to build the site in ArchiCAD from a surveyor’s .dwg and clean it up in SketchUp. By that point the .dwg file in SketchUp was almost ready to build 3D objects from. First head to head ArchiCAD vs SketchUp ‘battle’ that I’ve been in and it’s ArchiCAD 1 SketchUp 0. Just saying…

But back to finding objects online. An old coworker and I shared a story about downloading equipment to populate a public works building we worked on. Some equipment we built, others we found. We had no budget for downloads, so we were only looking for free objects. We found a great dumptruck, but it had one problem. Half of it was red. We could control the materials on the right side, but not the left. And the object was Russian, so we couldn’t understand any of the options and I wasn’t yet capable enough to open the object and explore the GDL. I probably could fix it now, two years later. But that’s not going on the to do list when I get my time machine. If I get my time machine.