Content area
Full text
Building modeler delivers drawings with easy to use modeling tools.
ARCHICAD 9 ARRIVED WITH what at first I thought were minor improvements. But they add up to quite a lot, especially for 3D work, visualization, and working on a laptop with a cramped screen (figure 1). The latter situation may occur often now that ArchiCAD supports terminal server technology that makes it possible to work over the Internet from a remote location.
This new release also benefits from improvements in DWG compatibility and an improved library search system that enables symbols to be found by name (figure 2). About 2,600 symbols are included in the libraries that ship with the software.
Text input and display are also improved. Users can grab dimension text with visible handles to move and edit, and also paste whole blocks of formatted text from most word processors (figure 3, p. 30).
All of this is particularly important to ArchiCAD's market of architects, builders, planners and facilities managers (there's a special ArchiCAD version for FM). Among major, full-featured (and, need we say, expensive) CAD packages, only ArchiCAD and Nemetschek's Allplan are specifically aimed at the builder market. Bentley and Autodesk add an architectural interface to their products. ArchiCAD can't match Allplan for structural design calculations, although it does feature a built-in truss designer and column designer. ArchiCAD provides a lot more power than the typical architectural design software package, but is still easy, nimble and intuitive to use.
As with v8.1, ArchiCAD runs on Macintosh and Windows 2000/XP machines. Graphisoft's minimum memory requirement for both platforms is 512MB. I found v9 usable on a Windows XP machine, but slow and crash-prone on an OS X Macintosh G4. I suggest that you spring for a gigabyte of memory for either platform. The new version is faster than v8.1, and I suspect it's faster than v7 (I benchmarked the older version on a slower machine, so I'm not absolutely sure). Crash recovery is better now-all the project files seem to survive.
Moving to 3D
I've been an ArchiCAD fan for well over a decade, since the days when it...