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ArchiCAD is a high-end architectural modeling, drawing, and drafting package at a high-end price. Many will find the $4,295 price tag worth it, however. With each new release, ArchiCAD adds more production CAD and workgroup features. Although it was developed for the Macintosh in the early 1980s, Windows versions make up two-thirds of recent sales. ArchiCAD remains the most fullfeatured architectural CAD package for the Macintosh.
With ArchiCAD you can rough out the master plan for an entire college campus, draft the production drawings for a specific building, model the details, render the scene, create an animated QuickTime VR walk-through, and plot the whole project on paper. The system generates enough data, including bills of materials, to keep a squad of accountants happy for months.
ArchiCAD's internal programming language, GDL (geometric description language), is powerful and fully parametric. There's even a Resize command that resizes the base geometry by a given ratio you specify. The syntax looks a lot like Visual BASIC. GDL describes objects in 3D and 2D. Shapes such as Brick and Mesh are built into the language, along with directives that describe objects' surface finish and color.
Working with ArchiCAD is a breeze. For this review, we worked with a late beta of the software. Its speed on a Pentium is comparable to the wonderfully fast AutoCAD Release 14. Usually, you draw in plan in the floor plan worksheet. ArchiCAD automatically turns the 2D plan into 3D, based on what you specify for the object you draw. A wall has the height and composition you request-just draw a line where you want it. Now you can pick up the settings of existing elements and apply them to new ones. This object orientation was built into ArchiCAD from the very beginning. In fact, ArchiCAD was almost certainly the first CAD program to track drawing entities as objects.
Collaboration
The teamwork function lets an unlimited number of project collaborators access different workspaces in the same project file and work on them at the same time. To share a project, a team leader selects Share a Project from a pull-down menu and creates an administrative file detailing access rights. Other team members sign on and define the workspace they want to modify. After sign-in, they...