Videos

ArchiCAD Template Basics: View Map and Layout Book

Templates are a big deal. Your template can determine whether you make or lose money with BIM. A strong template can make you efficient. A poor template can win you a gold medal for Wheel Reinvention. I’m not being hyperbolic. To succeed at BIM, you need a strong template. Without that, all the other time, money, and effort you throw at BIM will be severely handicapped. I get a lot

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Anything You can Do, I can Do Better: taking materials from SketchUp to ArchiCAD

I expect to have dozens of people argue against that title. But I sure bet it caught your attention. The real point is that most architectural software has something to teach us about our own preferred program. The examples are endless. But today I want to focus on one program in particular: SketchUp. SketchUp models, the traditional variety of them, have this beautiful balance of realism and abstraction. They sit

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Skill vs Power: Learning BIM

If you have six minutes, please do yourself a favor and watch this video. But instead of thinking about video games, think about BIM adoption in firms. Specifically think about people learning ArchiCAD, Revit, or one of the other BIM authoring tools out there. Here’s the best analogy from the video, or an approximation at least. If you’re under 40, you’ve probably played Street Fighter II. Or something very similar.

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The Organizer… aka the Navigator’s Big Brother

I actually mean both Big Brother as in your wise male sibling who was born before you AND that all seeing eye of some over arching organization. The Organizer is pretty awesome and powerful like that. I cover a lot in this ArchiCAD tutorial video. I talk about the Navigator, the Organizer, the differences between the View Map, Project Map, Layout Book, and Publisher. I go over the basics of

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Video games, Micro-transactions, and Nine Minutes of your Time well spent

So you know micro-payments have been on my mind recently. I’ve been thinking a lot about how in conjunction with augmented reality and/or QR codes these small amounts of money offer some intriguing possibilities for architects. I’ve also been dwelling on all that for a few reasons that go beyond architecture. I’ll do my best to share the details soon, but I have some personal requirements to get out of

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Picking a Subtype for an ArchiCAD Object (and some other important tips)

One of the greatest improvements in ArchiCAD 16 is how much easier it is to make objects. Not that it was particularly hard before, but along with the Morph Tool there have been some tweaks that mean there’s no excuse to not make lots of objects (and share them). But just selecting some elements and saving them as an object is usually not enough. You want to add some intelligence

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Creating keyboard shortcuts in ArchiCAD, a quick and helpful video

I regularly get questions about keyboard shortcuts. Probably the top two questions are “Is there a keyboard shortcut for Function A?” or “How do I make a keyboard shortcut for Function A?“. Well to answer both those questions and some others as well, I’ve created this short how-to video on creating keyboard shortcuts in ArchiCAD. Enjoy! For more information on Keyboard Shortcuts in ArchiCAD, check out these links: Keyboard Shortcuts

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Cutting a hole in a 2D Morph

Over on BIM Engine (the Graphisoft North America Blog which I also write for), someone had a question about how to cut a hole in a 2D Morph. Well the easiest way to explain that was to do a quick video. So here’s the answer. Thanks and Enjoy! And here’s a link to the original blog post where you can learn about some surprising benefits of the Morph Tool. Like

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