HOW DO YOU FIND TIME TO LEARN NEW SOFTWARE & STILL FUNCTION AS A WORKING OFFICE?

I Find That Dedicating At Least 15 Hours A Week Is Needed To Learn Archicad

If you have just found this post through a search engine I am an Adelaide Architect Changing my Office over from ArchiCad to AutoCad.

Finding the time to concentrate on learning a new program is hard. I've made a big effort over the past couple of weeks, clocking up 32 hours of practice in that time. To be honest I think that this is really about the minimum you need to do to make progress. I've finally started to be able to draw without stopping and thinking too much and getting the hang of the all important (but ridiculously tricky) keyboard shortcuts.

Using Someone Else's Archicad Dawing As A Learning Tool Is Helpful

I got hold of someone else's drawing which was a big help. Lots of library stuff was missing but that didn't matter. The important thing was to look at how the project was constructed. The use of layers, how the renovation filter works, how their views were set up and how the views relate to the paper space layouts and final drawing sets.

Archicad Is NOT Intuitive

Many things are very unintuitive no matter what the hype about the product says and so having an actual project to dissect was invaluable.  Luckily I know what I want to do from my Autocad experience and just have to relate what I am doing in Archicad back to that. I have been working on a trial Archicad project that I am currently simultaneously documenting for a client in my usual Sketchup & Autocad workflow method. It means that I know the building well and each step I take in Autocad I then just repeat in Archicad. As a training mechanism this works very well. It just means that my billable hours have been shot this fortnight.... all in the sake of not being left on the technological scrapheap. 

AutoCad 2D Drawings Still Have Relevance

What I have seen so far now confirms my original thoughts. A lot of the talk about 3d models and BIM is all just marketing hype. We use it because we are told it is the way of the future. Frankly my old 2d Autocad is so much quicker to get a small job up and running, and I do not have to wait endlessly for it to do something as simple as pick an object or edit a piece of text. I use far less mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to achieve the same end. Also it still has a huge following among the Engineering profession which means compatibility issues are few.

The positive for Archicad is that you have "smoke and mirrors" to fool clients

It can look like you have produced a lot of work in a short space of time. Most of this is in the automatic generation of elevations and sections and being able to what looks like entire drawing sets prepared almost automatically.  When you look closely however the sections reveal nothing much more than floor levels ceiling heights and window & sill levels. The detail at 1:50 is actually less than what I would have produced with a pen on a sheet of tracing paper 20 years ago. Any more than 1:50 and the sections are laughable. I asked how the Section details are produced in my friends office and it eventuates that they just draw them individually and only use Archicads sections for reference....more smoke and mirrors.

Archicad seems a Powerful yet poorly designed piece of Software... AutoCad still comes out on top

So I am forging ahead anyway just because everyone else is and I don't want to be a dinosaur, but I really do not think that Archicad is anywhere near as well thought through as Autocad when it comes to documentation. The beauty of it is instantaneous 3d generation and elevation generation during the sketch design and design development phases. It is easier to see how the disparate elements meet each other and design changes can be made very quickly and viewed instantly. All very impressive stuff if you are a client. However when it comes to documentation good old Autocad still rocks!!