Book Image

A BIM Professional's Guide to Learning Archicad

By : Stefan Boeykens, Ruben Van de Walle
Book Image

A BIM Professional's Guide to Learning Archicad

By: Stefan Boeykens, Ruben Van de Walle

Overview of this book

A BIM Professional’s Guide to Learning Archicad is a comprehensive introduction to all that Archicad has to offer for creating 3D models, 2D document extracts, and related outputs. This book is not a click-by-click series of recipes, but rather focuses on helping you understand why and how Archicad works by providing realistic examples and expert tips. The book gradually introduces you to Archicad tools using ample examples. It then helps you master its complexity through clear modules, allowing you to start your first project quickly, gain useful skills in subsequent projects, and keep using the book as a source for insights into the software. You’ll start with the basic modeling of construction elements and then move on to adding roofs, stairs, and objects to the project. Next, you’ll dive into basic drafting and 2D views for creating 2D output, and grasp how to use attributes and more advanced modeling tools for designing curtain walls and sites. The concluding chapters will show you how to extract and visualize your data and automate the publishing of your extracts and 2D documents into a variety of output formats. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of Archicad, how to implement it efficiently in your architectural projects, and how BIM can improve your overall design workflow.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Archicad – Project Setup and Essential Modeling Tools for Your First Residential Project
9
Part 2: Becoming an Archicad Professional – Learn About Archicad Tools and Settings to Create and Publish Any Type of Project in Full Detail

What to do when you get stuck

This book is aimed at reaching an intermediate level in using Archicad, in a step-by-step way. However, from our teaching experience, we know that anyone learning to use a new software or application – no matter how well they follow the steps or do the exercises – will reach a point where they get the feeling, I thought I knew this, and I’m pretty sure it should work this way, but it doesn’t. This sense of frustration is completely normal and mostly occurs when you try to apply newly learned techniques within your own projects. To help you overcome this feeling, and any difficulty you might have in using Archicad in your own projects, we would like to provide some tips and tricks.

Remember the on-screen feedback

At the very beginning of the book (Chapter 2, in the Understanding Archicad on-screen feedback section), we showed you how Archicad helps the user to do what the software expects or needs as input. When reviewing...