It’s been a few days since I watched the BIM Components webinar and I’m still super excited

I’ve already used ArchiCAD 16 as a beta tester and even gave my own presentation on it to the Minnesota ArchiCAD Usergroup back in May. But watching the BIM Components webinar I learned a bunch of new stuff and I can’t wait to start using ArchiCAD 16. Yesterday while working in ArchiCAD 15, I came across about 3 or 4 instances where I really wanted to change an element into a Morph to test out a few quick design options. At one point I wanted to sculpt the corner of a stair tread and a little later I really wanted to pull down the corner of a soffit to see what it’d look like if it had an irregular sloped bottom surface. In the end I faked the stair in 2D (it wasn’t critical to see in 3D) and rationalized why the slopped soffit wasn’t going to look good (and therefore I didn’t need to model it). Had I wanted to model both in ArchiCAD 15, I could have handled the stair with an SEO and the soffit with some roofs. But it wouldn’t have been quick. And I just wanted speed.

I wanted to sketch in 3D with the freedom I have when building physical study models

Turning elements into morphs, even temporarily, to test design options is going to completely revolutionize how we work in ArchiCAD. It’ll be so fast and easy to model ‘what ifs’. I think there are a lot of great workflow advancements just waiting to be discovered once we all start using the Morph tool. Think about it. ANYTHING in ArchiCAD can be turned into a Morph and tweaked in countless ways. ANYTHING. Imagine what a Morph as an Operator in an SEO will be able to do to normal objects.

Wait Jared, what do you mean make something temporarily a Morph? Isn’t morphing a one way street??? It is. But that’s what copying an element, doing a save as of the file, or a lot of Undo/Redo is for. This of course means that creating Morphs is going to make a rigorous backup regiment even more critical. But fortunately by now you back up everyday, right? RIGHT? RIGHT?

I haven’t forgotten that this post is about watching Webinars

You can watch the BIM Components webinar and a bunch of other great recent Graphisoft webinars here. If you haven’t watched the BIM Components webinar yet, you really need to.