Many of you have probably heard of Eric Bobrow. He’s the guy behind ArchiCAD Master Template. Eric was a major Graphisoft reseller for 21 years and is now focused on improving our ArchiCAD skills. Eric has put together a new online training course on the most effective methods for working in ArchiCAD. In a recent article, AECBytes Tips and Tricks #56, he goes over his 7 Keys to Best Practices
Okay. Time to learn GDL. Check out Rabbit Hole Falling into GDL. It’s a new blog with a beautiful name by ArchiCAD-Talk regular Erich. It was started just last month (January 2011). There are only 3 posts so far, but they are good and clear. I’m not sure I could handle more than a few blog posts a month about GDL. My brain might explode. I need to start using
At the Usergroup meeting in January we talked about working between SketchUp and ArchiCAD. You can read the recap here. Scott Newland of Newland Architecture (digress for a moment and check out his website) wasn’t able to attend the meeting, but he did some exploration after reading the recap. Here’s his experience with modeling a light fixture in SketchUp and then bringing it over to ArchiCAD: What was used: ArchiCAD
Is ArchiCAD not acting properly? Object movement or 3D navigation is sluggish. The cursor keeps disappearing. Have you tried turning it off and on again? My brother is in IT and I’ve learned it’s a truism of computers. Don’t just close the file. Close down ArchiCAD. Restart your computer even. If ArchiCAD suddenly starts acting weird, 90% of the time this is the solution. Computers get weird. I swear there
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.
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
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.
