Blindly Stumbling Through Archicad

It was probably a poor decision on my behalf to move my workflow to Archicad to try out how good the program really was (all those Curtin students boasting that they can draw a plan and it appears in a section, ha), because I have no idea how to use it and it pretty much took me half a week crash coursing on Archicad 101. Which meant I hadn't moved on my design which is, well, poorly developed itself.

I funnily enough like Autocad better, but now this late night I think I have all the basics figured out (except the curtain walls). Here's some things I've encountered:

1. Archicad works on the basis on architectural elements. So they have buttons to draw walls, and draw windows and so on. You might think, duh, but Autocad does not have that, and you have to draw a representation on Autocad using the line/polyline command (unless you are on Revit).

2. Based on this fact, I found it very hard to get off the ground at first, because in order to create a building you have to know the properties of your architectural elements. That means it forces you to think of basic materials before you start designing, and to such a depth which I don't normally touch on.

3. I hated having to dive through many settings to get things right, and not knowing where everything was due to being buried in context menus (normal when you're starting out on how to use a program though). For example, I couldn't insert any exact lengths into the program, and I was so annoyed until I found out that somehow the 'tracker' that was supposed to input coordinates was switched off somehow. It took me 4 hours to figure that one out. Also took me half a day to figure out how to chuck 2 openings in a lift and how to make the lift openings open the right way.

4. No command line. Grr. I never thought I'd miss the command line out of all things, because that was what made 'CADing' fast in Autocad. But then again, with the layout of Archicad more similar to something like 3dsmax, doesn't seem a command line is needed.

5. When you have to extend or trim or rotate a line (which is quite often), I was so annoyed that you had to go to the context menu all the time like the tutorial told me to, but eventually I found out about the pet palette. A bit late.

6. Because of the settings needed for each element it's definitely easy to make changes later down the track. Yes, no need to trim thousands of lines because you moved a room or thickened the walls!

7. I hope I can hit two birds with one stone after I finish modeling my building. If I can get 3D view to work, then this means I have already done my perspectives, which usually take 2 more days. But I might have to export my project back into Autocad, to fix a few things that can't be drawn in Archicad.