Seattle ARCHICAD User Group — September 21st, 2017
We’re heading back to Hoffman Construction’s office in downtown Seattle for our September ARCHICAD user group. We also already have our November meeting scheduled; look for a link to that at the bottom of this post as well.
DATE:
Thursday September 21st, 2017
6:00 PM — 8:00 PM
LOCATION:
Hoffman Construction
600 Stewart St #1000
Seattle, WA 98101
HOSTS:
Willard Williams, AIA (Hoffman Construction), Thomas Bormann, and Jared Banks, AIA
ARRIVAL INSTRUCTION:
Enter the building on 6th street between Stewart and Westlake. Someone (Willard, Jared, Thomas and/or Vance) will be waiting in the lobby to let you in the building and deliver you to the 10th floor where you will be greeted by friends, food, drinks, and ARCHICAD. Please try to arrive no later than 6:30 so we don’t have to leave someone at the door the entire meeting. If you’re running late, call or text Jared: 206.504.3075.
TOPICS:
- Energy Evaluation – Energy modeling has been integrated into ARCHICAD for a while now, but are any of us using it? Thomas Bormann will give a presentation and lead a discussion on energy modeling in ARCHICAD 21.
- CineRender – Kyle DeHaven will give a short presentation on CineRender. Our plan is to have Kyle teach us a little bit about rendering at each of our meetings.
- ARCHICAD 21, etc. – With whatever time we have left I will get us all sharing our thoughts on ARCHICAD 21. My hope is that I’ll be deep into rebuilding my ARCHICAD 21 template by the time of the meeting. As of today, I’ve migrated all my current projects from 20 to 21, but am still basically using my ARCHICAD 21 workflows.
If you’ve got a current issue, please bring that as well. Our group has a huge collective knowledge. Let’s share what we are doing well and what we’d like to do better. To that end, if you have a project you’d like to share, bring your laptop or a thumb drive (if you bring a thumb drive, save your project as a .PLA so there aren’t missing library parts). I of course will have my machine and projects to share, but I’d love to get someone else’s projects 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!
Food and refreshments will be served.
As we always like to do, we plan on having an after-party ARCHICAD nerdfest at a nearby bar. 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 GSNAÂ know they need to feed you: REGISTER HERE!
November 2017 User Group
I’ll do a proper blog post and e-mail announcement in late October/early November, but we have a date and location for our November meeting as well. For details, and to register, click here.
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.
ARCHICAD job hunters!
If you are in the Seattle area and need work, e-mail me. There are plenty of people who want to talk to you. 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 an ARCHICAD firm in need of help, definitely e-mail me. I regularly hear from people looking for work, so if I don’t have someone for you today, I bet someone will be reaching out to me soon. As always 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.
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.
Phil Allsopp
Hi Jared:
Sorry I won’t be able to attend the Seattle User Group meeting – its a bit of a trip from Phoenix :). I use EcoDesigner Star extensively for all of our projects so would be very interested in learning from Thomas Bormann about his experiences. We ran into several issues with what appeared to be “upside down” algorithms within EcoDesigner and EcoDesigner Star such as selecting a better quality window frame but ending up with a lower R value!
Overall I’d love to see EcoDesigner be fully integrated into ARCHICAD’s BIM model. This is where the credibility of EcoDesigner could be far greater than it is today. By this I’m referring to EcoDesigner’s current requirement that you select shade types for windows whereas if you actually install those 3D objects around a window, the objects will create shade patterns depending on the geo location and time of day. Given that ARCHICAD already calculates the complex shading patterns resulting from roof overhangs or shading devices, having EcoDesigner ask what type of shade structure is being used seems illogical and something that’s prone to guesswork rather than have the BIM model itself drive all of the physical parameters and material specifications necessary for accurate energy calculations.
Additionally, users need a lot more granularity in the selection of energy consumption per unit area for “equipment”. This actually refers to all of the typical stuff a building might have such as ovens, fridges, microwaves, TVs, computers and so on. Manufacturers of these cite energy consumption in watts per hour so its fairly easy to calculate the watts per SF being sounded during different parts of the day by this kind of equipment. I have a spreadsheet on this if it will be a help to you. Let me know.
Also, we need more choice of HVAC systems and their specifications that are based on real-life systems that are used across the US. We rarely have “district heating” or “district cooling” in the US – approaches that are more common in Europe and Scandinavia. In our locale (Phoenix) newer high rise office complexes are producing huge excesses in chilled water that could be easily pumped to hundreds of surrounding apartments to provide cooling……Sensible, right? Yes except for dumb and hugely expensive regulations that would force the building to become a regulated utility for sharing its surplus energy. Got to keep the local utility company churning the profits, right?? !! Is this nuts or what??
Hope the event goes well.
Best
Phil
Jared Banks
Phil, I would love to have you up here for a meeting. Maybe the next time you’re in Portland we can coordinate a meeting there. Portland is now having regular ARCHICAD user group meetings. Also you all need to get them going in Phoenix. I’ve got a good friend who lives there and switched to ARCHICAD about two years ago. I know she and her firm would be thrilled to help get the group going. And I owe her a trip down there as well…
I don’t know the answers to any of your questions, but I will definitely share with you anything I learn. I think Thomas is doing a PowerPoint presentation, so that might be something I/he/we can share. I agree energy modeling in ARCHICAD has a long way to go. I’m hopeful that Thomas can show us how to use it for simple things. Even just enough to get low-level energy modeling as a basic service we do would be nice; even if it’s not super accurate. Something is hopefully better than nothing.
And of course yes. GRAPHISOFT needs to make sure its tools are appropriate for our market. But that’s a whole can of worms I don’t want to open today.
Phil Allsopp
Paragraph 3 error “rounded” should be consumed – sorry for the typo