AUTOCAD, ARCHICAD OR REVIT?..... THE BEST SOFTWARE FOR A SOLE PRACTICING ARCHITECTS OFFICE

Archicad Didn't Perform As Well as I Had hoped

If you have just found this post without reading my previous ones....I'm an Adelaide Architect & It's been 9 months since I decided I would transition my office from AutoCAD to ArchiCad. The original aim was to replace my existing 2d Autocad documentation system with 3d Archicad. My conclusions are that in contrast to the hype about the product Archicad is not  easy to learn and intuitive.  The program and files are huge and much down-time is spent just waiting for screen regenerations. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are 2 key & are difficult to achieve with one hand and if you take the other hand off the mouse it is counter productive. Many of the shortcuts are hard to remember & not mnemonic.... hitting "K" for text is just ridiculous!!! Demolition plans (even with the new demolition feature) are not easy to produce. Selection of objects can be a bit hit and miss.... you think that you haven't selected an object and try again (and again). Sometimes an object just will not select easily & other times it is just due to the fact that the huge processing power required means the time-lag for the processor to communicate to the screen is delayed. The positives are the quick 3D sketch designs and the fact that you can generate a set of documentation that looks fairly complete (to an untrained eye) in a fairly short space of time. For a large office this means you can put out a set of documents, get your fee & deal with the problems later. The real detailing still needs to be done the old fashioned way, line by line by someone who knows how things are put together.  For a sole practitioner this "pump the drawings out" method just doesn't work..... you want to get the documentation right as you have to deal with the fall-out yourself. So Archicad is "Smoke and Mirrors". The reality is that the content isn't there. You get sections quickly but they don't tell you much more than ones you can sketch up by hand with a fat "felt tip" in a few minutes. If you want to get sections with real detail you have to still spend the time.  

 AutoCad Still Has It's Merits

So I started this little fling with Archicad because I had fallen out of love with Autocad. I documented the entire experience in a series of posts. The new program seemed exciting and new at first, but as time went by (and I became more familiar) the little things began to bother me & I began to long for the and easy relationship I had with Autocad.  I now know enough to produce a full set of documentation with Archicad.... but do I really want to??

After 9 months of Trialing Archicad I have now abandoned the idea of using it for my own practice. It wasn't wasted time however. I now know enough about Archicad to be able to understand and use it. This has made me comfortable with the fact that it just wasn't the right fit for me. I can see the benefits for a large office, or for a young student just starting out, but for a sole practitioner with plenty of construction experience AutoCad is still a winner.  

My Archicad experiment is now over & so I continue to use AutoCad in my Practice for 2D documentation. I produce 3D models in Google sketchup (free) when required. For a small practice I find this works well and the price is right.  I have stayed with AutoCad because it is familiar & I can produce a set of drawings that are highly resolved, a reasonable size, require minimal processing power and are compatible to most engineering companies.

Autocad may have won me back, but recently I find I am looking sideways at Revit & thinking about what she may be like.....

 ARCHICAD TRIAL VERSIONS: EVALUATION PERIOD IS TOO SHORT BEFORE SOFTWARE EXPIRES

Business is All About Marketing

Just a thought. (We Adelaide Architects are very good with spotting Advertising & Marketing solutions) If times are tough then it is time to market more effectively. I am only in business at all because I found a niche for picking up the jobs the other Architects didn't want and I worked out my rates on what I needed to live on working a pretty full week. Most Architects charge what they think they are worth, rating themselves against
other professionals or what the market rates are. I have started & been growing my practice through tough economic times. When things pick up I will change my strategy, but until then it is all about keeping it lean & providing value for money.

Autodesk, Graphisoft and Marketing: Trial Software expires too quickly

Autodesk picked up its lions share of the market by supplying the kids at Uni with free software about 20 years ago. They marketed for
the future and not the present. It all came back to price. Once these kids got work they used the product they knew. It took a few years but it was very effective strategy. After using Archicad (as an average bloke) I can safely say the product takes about 2 to 3 months of use to get a proper understanding of what is going on. This is if you can devote 8 hours a day to the thing. Most practitioners like me cannot afford that much time as we have to earn a living at the same time. I am now seven months into learning the product and am only now feeling a little familiar with it. I have almost finished my first project and am feeling pretty pleased with myself as this means that I am finally coming to grips with the program as a basic user. I can see that there is a lot to learn ahead of me but at least I have a foundation. Like most trial software ArchiCad lasts for a month before it runs out. This is way too short a time to be useful to anyone. If Graphisoft was prepared to put out free 4 month trials based on hourly usage of 8 hours a day I reckon they would do much better in this tough market. Now is the perfect time for Graphisoft to introduce a scheme like this, as Architects have time on their hands due to this sluggish economy.

Software Instruction Courses are Overpriced

These days no-one has money to pay for training courses especially as they are charged out at rates they think they are worth (just because that is what they could get in a good economy), so how about Graphisoft employing contractors that they hire out to businesses for in-house training a month or two at a time.  Long enough to run through a complete job with staff and actually work producing some product, not just being a teacher. If those in-house teachers only charged minimally more than standard contractor rates this would attract those smaller businesses
into using the product.  The contractor would build up standard office procedures, provide training and most importantly produce work at the
same time. This way at the end of a month or two the office may effectively have been trained at little or no cost as there has been a measurable value in output of work from the contractor as well as the harder to measure value of the training itself.  I did this for a couple of small businesses back in the  mid 90's with Autocad when that was still fairly new and they flourished whilst other bigger businesses folded.  Graphisoft re-sellers could handle this business & take  a small amount (say 15 percent) of the wages as a handling fee.  This will give Graphisoft a market in an area that they currently will never penetrate.... The contractors would get experience in a variety of offices in times when employment is difficult to find and it will provide a trickle of money to the re-sellers for running the contracting business. Give this 5 years and when the economy has picked up the re-sellers will have a much larger market to work with and they can start making the big bucks again, running those training courses and seminars that they currently charge corporate (ridiculous) prices for.

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!!

LEARNING ARCHICAD TAKES TIME AND THAT EQUATES TO LIFESTYLE AND FINANCIAL PENALTIES

It's been about 4 months since I bit the bullet and started learning Archicad and implementing it in my Adelaide Architects practice. At the moment I am wondering if I will ever use what I have learnt.  I haven't even opened up the program for 4 weeks, which hopefully is just a blip which I will recover from. The GFC has slowed down work with the firm that was going to give me on the job training so until those jobs come off hold I am back at my own business full-time.  My own jobs are not large-scale and so there is no slack in my fees for down-time. Managing your own business and generating a steady income stream whilst trying to transition from one CAD program to another is really hard to do! Starting during the Christmas period was a good idea as work is always slow at that time of year and I had plenty of down-time to get a good start on my "self-teaching" programme. I anticipated that the transition to running a full job would be hard so I tried running an Autocad job in tandem with doing the same job in Archicad. This was very time consuming, but I am glad I did as it proved to me that I was not anywhere near ready for running a new job solo without any Autocad backup.  As a small practice I really cannot afford to get my clients off-side and without my trusty Autocad that would certainly have occurred. I have now decided that I will just concentrate on producing 3d models in Archicad without using the program for any working drawing documentation. This means that a lot can be fudged and there is less setting up of the model. With this much easier task ahead of me I hopefully can get more positive results than I have been getting. As another avenue I have contacted a couple of people I know and hopefully will get some Archicad files that I can have a good look at and dissect. It is easier to work towards a goal if you have a few real-world examples to learn from. The tutorials Archicad provide are not suitable for small scale domestic work. Hopefully I will be back on track on my quest to teach myself  ArchiCad and more positive in my next entry.

I AM IMPRESSED WITH A STUDENTS WORK.... REVIT CAN CONSTRUCT QUICK 3D SKETCH MODELS

I've been too busy in my Adelaide Architect's Office to put in any effort towards Learning Archicad for almost a month now. I can knock out the jobs pretty quick in Autocad. I really cannot afford the kind of down-time the change-over will cost me. I have had a 5th year Uni Sa Architecture student working on jobs in parallel with me to show him how a small practice runs. He is experienced in Revit and what he knocked up in 2 and a half hours surprised me. I gave him a sketchup massing model and Autocad plans for a small 2 story house that clients wanted in a Tudor style to get past local planning Authority. Putting aside my gripes of how councils can be very dictatorial and proscriptive concerning what they will and will not grant planning approval for in the sake of Street-scape character (planners actually have no design content in their course... I could grumble for hours about that one) the resultant images this young guy produced in 2 and a half hours on Revit astounded me. I was informed by him that this was a very basic rendering due to time constraints. Also I was informed that Revit is being taught at the Uni. This is how they got market share 15 years ago with Autocad. I now have doubts if learning ArchiCad is the best thing for me. It is a big investment in time if Archicad is going to go the way of the Beta video format or Quikdraw (mmm if you've never heard of it you get the idea). I have posted similar views from my sketchup massing model and his Revit model.

Revit image created from an Autocad plan in 2.5 hours

Sketchup image with just enough detail added to understand design intent. I used sketchup to make a massing model to best work out how the elevations would look and to run a shadow study on the site for planning approval.