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
Micro Aided Design, the Graphisoft Reseller in Finland, has a really cool Add-On for ArchiCAD. They actually have a couple, but Zonematic really stands out. It will create zones from a text file–which from a programing and planning standpoint is just awesome. They have both an English and a Finnish version. You can read more about it and download it for free here.
Unfortunately we ran into some complications and couldn’t get a room at the UofM for our meeting. No worries. We’ll just meet at the offices of SALA Architects in Minneapolis. I’ll work on getting us onto campus in the future. It would be nice.
I like adding 3D views of the major facades on my cover sheets. I first did this about 3 years ago using the sketch rendering engine. I knew it was a good move when in a client meeting we hardly left the cover sheet while discussing the exterior of the house. I use 11_Tech_Pencil and turn down all the noise settings to zero. It makes a nice black and white
History lesson. My two favorite changes between version 9 and version 10 where the merging of Plotmaker into ArchiCAD and the arrival of multiple pen sets. There is a lot of power and utility with multiple pen sets. At SALA Architects, I use 6 pen sets on a standard project. In this post I’m going to discuss the basics of two: one pen set, with colors: STANDARD (COLOR) one pet
Date: Wednesday January 26, 2011 | 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | Location: SALA, Minneapolis In January we’re inviting students from the UofM to join us. This will be a great opportunity for professionals and students to share insights about ArchiCAD. If there’s anything specific you’d like to discuss, feel free to e-mail me beforehand. Or just come and ask.
December must have been the month of old files. I’ve had a few people ask me about opening up ancient projects. If you want to open a file from before v8.1 and only have v14 installed (I’m pretty sure even v11 can’t open anything older), there is a solution. You can download a free file converter that is an updated pre-installed older version of ArchiCAD. With the file converters you
My wife and I were watching Baking with Julia tonight. The episode co-starred Bread Machine Wizard Lora Brody of West Newton, Massachusetts. Julia Child, a bread machine skeptic, had a killer quote: You’re the boss of the machine It’s a wonderful mantra for ArchiCAD (Revit, Vectorworks, or any BIM program) and makes a great lead into my first post.
There are a couple ways to hang a picture in an ArchiCAD project. There is an object which I can never find in the library when I look for it. There’s also the object mentioned in this forum post. My preferred solution is to place a wall that is as wide, deep, and high as the desired frame (say 2′-11 1/2″ x 4′-8″ x 1″). Then place a niche into
