JTB wrote:I don't have the luxury of making my projects twice, I can't understand what you do for this.... If I design a building I have to produce my plans for our public service, I have to make the final construction details, and I have to make the 3d model for my client if he's an engineer or for the owner of the house.
For those of us who are either architects or designers where our primary work is to design and create 2D documents for construction, and the viz part is an extremely important (can not stress this enough), albeit very minor part of the $ contract, trying to find a one-does-all app such as Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Archicad, and Revit (maybe some others that I have not tried like Vectorworks) has been a very frustrating endeavor. Probably the biggest factor is that I don't have the $ and time resources to go out and buy and work with each app for several years to see how well it really works, not just what the sales hype is or what others who may have different standards of quality than I do have said. So we end up using the apps that the firms use where we work...we actually don't have a choice if you want to work there, or if we go out on our own, take a stab at one particular app which will likely be the one we've learned the best and reduce the enormous time required to become really proficient in these, and run with that, for better or worse. Even Archicad, which seemed to have such promise and touts itself as a one-in-all app has some really serious shortcomings, which are rather painful to work around. Back to the quote above, it seems to keep coming back to the fact that due some serious lack or incompleteness in each 3D app (that I have tried), and if as architects or designers we provide the architectural service from concept to construction docs, then we may end up having to duplicate the model...one best suited to deliver acceptable construction docs, and one suited to render out in a high quality presentation rendering. I might add that the Maxwell plugin in Archicad works fine and produces some stunning results, the lack in all "BIM" 3D/2D CAD packages is in what I will call more advanced modeling tools, UV mapping and materials/texture options that are better (though not all "perfect) in apps like FormZ, Rhino, C4D, Modo, etc. Anyway...even after having jumped in the CAD/3D arena 100% 20 years ago, I'm still searching for the best work flow....I'm thinking that the most time efficient is to take the 3D CAD program as far as it goes well for translating to 2D, then from there make a split to 2 models, one that would lead to 2D construction docs in 2D adding those elements, "lines, arcs, and circles", that the CAD package does not do well in a 3D to 2D translation, and another to be imported in a program like C4D to add such geometry like curved trims and for rendering out of C4D with the Maxwell plugin. Eventhough Archicad and C4D are now owned by the same company, I still find that the geometry transfer to C4D is not coming in a way I like, so still working with that. The idea is not to have to make any changes to the imported geometry, just adding the difficult stuff. Problem of course is when a client wants something changed that is in the CAD model, but I suppose you could reimport that changed part.
By the way, the options are no better for Windows programs.
- By Mark Bell
- By Edward Leibnitz