Here is the second part of my video series on Building Materials in ArchiCAD 17. If you haven’t already read the first blog post and watched the accompanying video, I suggest you start there. Here’s the link.

Now for Additional Notes and Corrections:

As many of you know, I prefer to do these videos in one take and post unedited. It’s faster for me that way. In the beginning of the video I state what I’m going to talk about, but I don’t exactly do what I say. I still cover everything I wanted to, more or less, just differently than I had originally planned.

I don’t cover thermal properties in this video (but did mention them in the last video). Basically by refining the existing Building Materials that Graphisoft gives you in their template, the thermal properties will be more or less set for most of your Building Materials.

James Badcock posted a comment on Facebook that gave more insight into why all those wacky Building Materials are generated when you migrate a template from ArchiCAD 6 to ArchiCAD 17. Here’s an excerpt:

…the generation of these Building Materials whilst many might look the same generally have small differences. The system looks through your entire model, including favourites, defaults, modelled elements and all attributes to find all the different combinations to convert. It also tries to override (element pen overrides/surface overrides) where possible to avoid an even longer list.

I think James makes a great point. I also want to clarify my method. My assumption is that your old template is riddled with countless very similar Building Materials because you did something wrong, didn’t understand something, or were lazy. And by you, I mean ME as well. Especially me. This isn’t condemnation. Template migration time is mistake fixing time; so let’s get better together. My blind drive to unify all the Building Materials that are similar is an attempt to clean up, fix, and erase old mistakes. If you find after doing this that in fact you should have two gyp. bd. or wood Building Materials then you can add those back. But again with my view of what should be included in a Building Materials, I’d argue for one of each major material and handle the subtle differences elsewhere.

Rob Jackson shared some other thoughts with me about his experiences with Building Materials. This one seemed the most pertinent to today’s video:

The biggest thing I’ve learnt is around colour. I’ve tried to be too clever I think. I saw Building Materials as I way to eliminate Surface Colour so I tried to do all in one. The more I think about it the more complicated this actually is…The only issue is for projects where you end up with say multiple types of brickwork. You would need a material for each so I may have Types for this. Timber is similar.

Rob’s comment makes me want sub-Building Materials that inherit most of their parent attributes. So you could have a Dimensional Lumber Building Material and then a bunch of sub-versions of it that have slightly different characteristics (really just different pre-defined surfaces). But the primary characteristics would be uniform and change in concert. In short you’d have a tree structure like this:

TIMBER (all Building Materials below are the same except for default Surface)
~~Painted
~~Unpainted
~~Stained

Maybe that’s overkill, but maybe it’d make things even more powerful. I don’t know. What do you think? What are your thoughts on having Parent and Child Attributes? Would that be too much work? Is the current system of global standards with individual element override the right solution?

All this talk about Templates got me thinking about all the different localizations of ArchiCAD, each with different libraries and templates. Do you have experience with different localizations of ArchiCAD? Are you interested in seeing what other people are using? Or do you have strong feelings about your own localized library and template? Share your thoughts and join the discussion on this LinkedIN thread.

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