Recently I’ve had opportunities to model quite a few schematic designs and imaginary buildings for the creation of renderings and walk-through movies. I love working on these types of models in ArchiCAD. A part of me would be happy to just get paid to design and model imaginary structures (take that as a hint). You don’t have to worry about how the building goes together. It’s just about surfaces, feelings and prettiness. Maybe that’s why I’m such a fan of Steven Holl’s phenomenological approach to architecture (and yes I know that’s an over simplification).

Because I’ve been focusing on the experience of viewing the models, I’ve learned a ton of cool new tricks in ArchiCAD. When working on presentation models one needs to create a lot of objects and elements that are typically ignored in a model built solely for construction documents. Many I’d never have found in my regular work. Take this post for instance. Or this one. Both are some of my favorite posts.

So here’s some cool stuff about slabs now that they can have custom edge conditions.

You can now download Tekla BIMSight directly from www.myarchicad.com. You can read about all the details here. This is a great step for the industry. We need convergence, openness, and interoperability between programs. I want to work in my software, you want to work in yours. We can share via a common language in a neutral, free platform. That’s the dream. And that’s what Tekla is aiming to do with BIMSight. It’s nice to see Graphisoft put their support behind this. I hope others do as well.

Here is another nice piece of industry news about increased sharing. I think it should really be titled Autodesk Stops Stonewalling Interoperability in AEC Industries. Or Maybe Autodesk Makes Timid Step Towards Playing Well With Others. Whatever the title, it’s nice to see Autodesk making an effort. Hopefully this is an honest step towards easier data exchange between competing platforms.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent trying to match shadows in renderings to photos. Why didn’t I think of this before? All digital photos have a date and time stamp. Plug that into ArchiCAD (3D projection settings/more sun), pick your location, set your project north correctly and that should be that.

This photo was taken in my driveway in St. Paul, Minnesota. Can you tell me when it was taken?

ArchiCAD 14 Hotfix #6 (Build 4204)

Here’s something worth reading now as well, from the release notes:

Notice to users who have both ArchiCAD 15 and ArchiCAD 14 installed

 ArchiCAD 14 Hotfix 6 (build 4204) should be applied together with ArchiCAD 15 Hotfix-2. This should be done,  to address Activity Monitor problems common to both BIM Server modules. These fixes will only be fixed completely if both modules are fixed simultaneously. To emphasize, you only need to apply this if you have the ArchiCAD 14 BIM Server module installed.

Follow the links to read more about each hotfix and download it. AND remember to update everyone using Teamwork 2 (including the BIM Server) at the same time.

Do you hate when walls don’t join properly or when hatch patterns in elevation randomly don’t align? In this video I talk about the Modify Wall menu and how it demystifies those issues. I won’t promise that the Modify Wall menu will solve every one of those problems. BUT once you are familiar with its abilities, you will always understand WHY those problems are happening.

In all these videos I try hard not to do too much with key commands. I want everything I do to be clear. But I have to admit I use two key commands a lot in this video without mentioning what I’m doing. One is Intersection (for me CMD+I), which will extend or shorten two walls so that they connect. The other is Undo (and redo, probably). Sorry about not mentioning that. So when you see things happening on screen as if by magic, it’s probably one of those two commands. Hopefully it just highlights the importance of key commands!!!

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