Professional designers operate in an increasingly competitive market. While striving to achieve excellence in their work, they still need to carefully manage their time and their resources to insure the profitability of their practice. This is not an easy task, because:
Customers are becoming more demanding, requesting more complex deliverables.
Professionals have been moving away from traditional methods (CAD) and the reasons are obvious:
2D CAD is not enough anymore. As clients are requesting to see the work, space-by-space in 3D. The designers find themselves journeying through their project over two separate tracks, one in 2D and another in 3D. They do so on separate software and that leads to duplicating a lot of their work.
2D CAD imposes a document-centric workflow. A lot of the time it is spent producing drawings, leaving less room for actual designing.
Worse still. Changes are unavoidable in design. When such changes occur, the traditional CAD user need to invest time, that is too often non-billable, to do the modifications and then coordinate all his documents. This amounts to tedious work that carries a high risk of making mistakes.
Moreover, many small and medium-sized firms are under the mistaken impression that they cannot compete with larger rivals, that have access to more resources. What if they have the same means and could shoot for larger projects.
Migrating to BIM? Yes, but you need to choose wisely!
A boost in profitability was promised to the professionals with the arrival of new technologies, most noticeably the Building Information Modelling (BIM). The migration from the traditional Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) to BIM is intended to significantly increase productivity. However, reaching success through BIM is not guaranteed and will depend on the adoption of a software that has been developed for the specific needs of the profession. Unfortunately, the prevailing BIM tool was originally developed for Engineers and most designers and architects find it lacking the flexibility they need to develop their design.
It's important that migration to BIM be smooth, with tangible and predefined efficiency gains.
Building Blocks of Design
What you should consider.
1
Conception
Is the software suitable to YOUR needs?
Will it smoothen your workflow to be?
2
Visualisation
Beyond traditional presentations, what constitutes the best ways to communicate your ideas first to your clients, then to consultants and contractors?
3
Production
How to avoid duplication of work and juggling a multitude of software?
Do you find yourself spending more time than anticipated modifying and coordinating your documents?
1
Conception: Archicad Is the Complete Solution for the Architects and the Designers
For the design professionals in the construction industry, ARCHICAD offers a streamlined workflow from the first sketch all the way through to construction.
Archicad is a Building Information Modeling (BIM) software developed by GRAPHISOFT enabling the Architects to harness all what the BIM can offer: improved communication, better coordination with consultants, flawless documentation. What makes Archicad special, is its focus on design, empowering it's the Architect to achieve great projects.
Archicad users love their software for the gains in productivity that it brings. When get asked about what differentiates Archicad from the other BIM or CAD software, we tend to elaborate about the user experience. A good software is a tool that fulfills the specific needs of its users, in the fastest and simplest way. It also empowers him to offer more to his customer, then he would do through more general use software.
While being a full BIM software, Archicad is not for everyone. It has been specifically for the Architects and Designers. It covers all they need to develop their project, from conception, to presentation, to the generation of design and construction documents, and this gets done through intuitive and simple to use task-oriented tools.
What differentiates Archicad from other BIM software is its focus on architecture, design. The tools and workflow are developed to suit the designing professionals needs and way of work. Always innovating to provide cutting-edge technology, framed to the requirements of its user base, allowing them to do what they do best: designing great projects.
Design in BIM
All creative work and design documentation happens in 3D, so you can make design decisions and see the results in a project’s real, 3D environment. Archicad offers you the most innovative tools available for architecture and design on the software market.
With the focus done on design, Archicad ensures that the design processes as well as the collaboration tools follow the designer’s requirements and the Archicad interface is laid out according to the designer’s creative workflow.
In addition to basic tools such as Walls, Slabs, Doors, Windows, architects and designers will appreciate the vast array of advanced tools such as Shell, Morph, Mesh tools, Curtain Wall, and Staircase.
Information is an intrinsic element of great value for BIM. Archicad helps designers get the most out of it! Extracting and leveraging well-structured data leads to huge time savings.
One Central Model, From the Start To the Finish!
Designers work on a single building model to create, document, and construct their ideas — changes are fast and automatic. The Archicad users can easily start their projects from the first sketch in Archicad. No need to resort to other software.
Since data is stored in a central place in a BIM model, any modification to the building design will automatically replicate in each view such as floor plans, sections and elevation. Users concentrate on the design and let the software generate the documents. That way, the time spent coordination between the documents (plans, sections, elevations, schedules, etc. get tremendously reduced.
It's Intuitive
It's important, while designing to have intuitive tools not instantly visible, but at the user's fingertips when needed.
Our clients love such tools as the Magic wand that traces the silhouette of 2D elements and 3D building components and helps create your elements quickly – trace wall perimeters to create a slab or a roof with a single click.
There is also Smart cursor shapes always provide feedback about the basic geometry relationships or proportions when creating or editing the design – indicating perpendicular, tangential, and parallel directions on floor plans or in 3D views.
And then there is the context sensitive Pet Palette offers the most relevant tools and commands that come in handy for the editing work you’re doing – stretching and modifying options automatically appear when you select a window in 2D or 3D.
Those tools and many more, speeds up work, and allow a better exploration of the design options.
One-Click Publication
One-click publishing and state-of-the-art revision management helps teams working on large projects using various file formats.
Designers can choose from the most common file formats, including .dwg, .pdf, as well as the BIMx Hyper-model file format.
2
Visualisation: Archicad Gives Outstanding Presentations, Out of the Box
Still images, animations, or interactive Hyper-models, ARCHICAD provides professional, out-of-the-box solutions for all your presentation needs. You can also synchronize your project with immersion-based software for a seamless Virtual Reality experience.
Photorealistic Rendering and animations
Built-in sketch rendering and MAXON’s Cineware are fast and easy-to use, producing outstanding images for your client presentations. Archicad provides out-of-the-box profiles to speed up the configuration of the render.
One-button “photoshoot” rendering can be used to easily produce convincing, high-quality results, while fast preview and background processor support make the rendering workflow a smooth and uninterrupted process.
Create even more life-like presentations by connecting your rendered images with a camera path, resulting in animations.
The seamless file export from Archicad to CINEMA 4D enables users to enhance their projects with high-end animation and visualization techniques and benefit from decreased render times thanks to the highly-efficient distributed rendering solution found in CINEMA 4D.
Archicad also has plugins that helps it sync with major recent rendering software, including Twinmotion, Enscape, and Lumion.
BIMx: Interactive Models on Your Mobile Device
Create a fully-interactive design presentation package that runs on mobile devices and can be viewed by all the project stakeholders.
With BIMx, GRAPHISOFT is giving the architects and designers a powerful tool to explore, communicate, and share their project designs with their customers, consultants, and on site with contractors.
Graphisoft has a beautiful interactive web page explaining the BIMx and the different ways of using it.
3
Performance Counts
How frustrating can it be to wait for views to load! ARCHICAD has been optimized for lightning-fast response times even on older equipment. In terms of performance ARCHICAD is the undisputed speed leader in the BIM business.
Archicad’s Predictive background processing feature takes advantage of unused computer capacity by anticipating what you might do next and preparing for it in the background.
In Archicad, opening and navigating between different views of the model will happen almost instantly. No need to wait for a view to load. So you'll save time and enjoy a more efficient work process. You will be able to focus on the design, instead of distracting yourself with endless waiting.
By optimizing OpenGL, Archicad ensures smooth and lightning-fast navigation – even on extremely large building models.
Architects appreciate Archicad’s 3D model window for informal client presentations. And because Archicad uses a fully-optimized OpenGL engine, you’ll get smoother, faster 3D navigation, without flickering—even with extremely large models.
Take Action Now!
It's time for you to adopt the better workflow!
Just contact us and we can do a full assessment of your current software and how start planning the future. In the meantime, you can also do the following...