Last week was Thanksgiving in the United States. My wife, daughters, and I drove down to Texas to visit family, friends, and do some business (the benefits of partnering with your best friend). So my time to write was severely limited. In fact I told myself I’d skip the week and not post. It’d be my first off week in 2 1/2 years. I nearly failed. I wrote most of this post, but never got around to sharing it.

Zones of Thanks

Are you using zones in ArchiCAD? They’re wonderful. Here’s a great Ode to Zones from Zolna, another ArchiCAD user and BIM blogger.

On a different note, here’s a good ArchiCADwiki article on what affects zones. The ArchiCADwiki actually has very few articles on Zones, let’s get on that! If you read my BIM Engine posts then you also know I’m a fan of the online help pages. The dryness of the help pages are usually directly proportional to their awesomeness and ability to reveal the esoterica of ArchiCAD. So here’s the online help page for zones.

Anyways I use zones mostly for my room schedules and auto-naming of interior elevations. But they are so much more powerful (as Zolna discusses). I’ll leave you with this image of zones. I’ll be talking about it in DC in two weeks. And then I’ll write a full post sometime in December (hint: it’s a cost diagram). How are you using zones in ArchiCAD?

Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy your zones.

Jared

PS – There’s plenty of other great posts on Zolna’s blog that have nothing to do with the Zone Tool or even ArchiCAD. Here’s on about BIM and the new James Bond Movie: Good Luck with That!

IFC note: As Rob from Bond Bryan wisely points out, the Zone Tool should really be renamed the ‘Space Tool’ (IfcSpace) given that’s what we are really modelling. And tiny tweaks like this will help move us closer and closer to OpenBIM and the dream of full interoperability.