It’s that time: we’re having another Seattle ARCHICAD User Group. Once again we’ll be meeting at DeForest Architects. Thanks Geoff, John, and everyone else at DeForest for letting us invade your space.

Date:

Thursday March 3rd, 2016
6:00 PM — 8:00 PM

Location:

DeForest Architects
1148 NW Leary Way
Seattle, WA 98107

Host:

John Magnan, GRAPHISOFT North America West Region Sales Director

Topics:

A few of us met with the local Faro Laser rep in early January. He showed us all about Faro’s laser scanning tools. And we in turn showed him all about ARCHICAD. As a result, we have a couple of Point Cloud scans of the room we’ll be meeting in-and a few of us can share our experiences of importing and working with Point Clouds in ARCHICAD 19. Since we’re not sure whether the Point Cloud conversation will take up the whole evening (it won’t), we’re going to expand the conversation to existing conditions in general. We’ll discuss tips for getting data into ARCHICAD (are people measuring by hand, laser tape, hiring 3rd party services), working with Renovation Filters, dealing with phasing, modeling complex geometry found in so many existing buildings, and much more. If we have time we might also talk about the existing conditions that all projects have: the site itself.

If you have a project you’d like to share, bring your laptop, a thumb drive, or send the file to Jared before hand (if you are sharing a project not from your own machine, save your project as a .PLA so there aren’t missing library parts). Thomas, Geoff, and I will have our machines and projects to share, but we’d love to get someone else’s project up on the screen. Are you brave enough?

If there’s a specific topic you’d like to discuss, or a project you’d like to share, let me know so that we make sure there’s time!

As we always like to do, Geoff and I plan on having an after-party ARCHICAD nerdfest at a nearby bar. Plus GRAPHISOFT North America  will again be feeding us during the meeting. Please share this post and e-mail it to all your coworkers. I know not everyone gets the official e-mails about user groups-especially new and/or quieter employees.

A Big Link to Register for the User Group

Go sign up to claim your spot and let Jesse know he needs to feed you: REGISTER HERE!

ARCHICAD job hunters!

If you are in the Seattle area and need work, e-mail me. If you want to move to Seattle and use ARCHICAD, e-mail me as well-especially if you like the freelancer lifestyle. If you are a firm looking for help, make sure I know that, too. I can’t promise anything, but I like to know both sides of the equation. I’ll be honest though, the answer to our need for ARCHICAD help in Seattle (and so many other places) is training new users. The ARCHICAD community is larger now than it has ever been. And it needs to be larger. Not just because a bigger community is more sustainable, but because there’s more work than we can all handle. I don’t know of any firm that uses ARCHICAD that considers themselves overstaffed. It’s time to hire new people and train them on ARCHICAD from the ground up. And as I’ve been saying for months now, if there are enough new users in Seattle that need training, we’ll organize some sort of group event.

Seattle Area ARCHICAD User Mailing List

I maintain a list for ARCHICAD users in the Seattle Area (or people interested in Seattle Area ARCHICAD events). If that describes you, sign up by clicking here.

Subscribe to my blog to read more about the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century, and more info on various ARCHICAD meet-ups across the globe: Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and the RSS feed. If you aren’t in Seattle, don’t worry. There are a lot of other user groups coming up. Check out a big list here for all the events GRAPHISOFT North America knows about.