Skip to main content

ArchiCAD 14 announced

While I have tried to participate in the beta-testing of ArchiCAD 14, I did not have to time to seriously do anything with it. Luckily, the wait for the rest of the world is mostly over as Graphisoft announced r14 of ArchiCAD.

The focus is on Collaboration, primarily targeting IFC and other file exchange workflow improvements.

http://www.graphisoft.com/community/press_zone/archicad-14-announce.html

On a personal note, most of the long-standing frustrations and limitations still apply to this release. I'm not going to repeat them all here, as not to sound too negative, but I do want to share some of my gripes.

The inconsistency between curtain wall and other tools, the lack of proper intersections between floor slabs and walls (still), not allowing floor slabs to have a slope, the 4 different rendering engines (most of them leftovers from the early days), the lack of radiosity rendering for the LightWorks engine, the lack of reference geometry in the 3D Window, the large list of half-baked features...
Graphisoft is still very innovative, but they seem to lack some of the overall focus to finish their features fully and to really improve the 3D building model.

I agree on improving stability, scaleability, collaboration and improved documentation, but the real improvements on the proper 3D model (capable of getting good 2D drawings out of it) are sorely missing.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...
2 comments
Read more

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 9 - using IfcConvert)

This is part 9 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss the IfcConvert utility from the IfcOpenShell Open Source IFC Library to preprocess an IFC model for integration with Unity. This is (finally?) again a coding post, with some scripts which are shared to build upon. Conversion of IFC into Unity-friendly formats The strategy with this approach is that you preprocess the IFC-file into more manageable formats for Unity integration. Most Web-platforms do some sort of pre-processing anyway, so what you see in your browsers is almost never an IFC-file, but an optimised Mesh-based geometric representation. However, it wouldn’t be BIM-related if we’d limit ourselves to the geometry, so we will parse the model information as well, albeit using another, pre-processed file. IFC to Wavefront OBJ I used a test IFC-model and used the IfcConvert-utility converted it into OBJ en XML formats. The default way to use it is very simple: ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 8 - Strategies to tackle IFC)

This is part 8 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss IFC as a transfer format towards Unity. As with the previous post, this is not a coding post, although hints and examples are provided. Open BIM and IFC Everybody who ever met me or heard me present on a conference or BIM-lecture will not be surprised to hear that I’m a strong believer in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open standard, with already two versions published as an ISO standard, being IFC2x2 and IFC4 (but surprisingly not IFC2x3 which is widely used). In the ideal world, this would be the format to use to transfer BIM data into another environment, such as Unity. So what are our options? Looking in the Unity Asset Store Assimp is a library which supports multiple formats, including IFC. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/trilib-unity-model-loader-package-91777   I did a few attempts, but alas without any success. It is po...
Post a Comment
Read more