oddities of archicad

ICONS:

• when the cursor changes to a bulldozer icon, archicad is autosaving the current file.

• when the cusor appears as a rope (i think is the best way to descibe it), you are in the marquee tool.

• looping arrows: orbit mode is active

• hand: "talk to the hand," you can the move view by clicking and moving the mouse.


• scissors: trim. you are in the trim tool, used to to trim walls flush to other walls. to access this command, hold down the cntrl key for pc's, or the command key for macs.

• magic wand: magic wand. hold down the space bar to access this command. an example of how the magic wand rocks is, after drawing a uniquely shaped slab, click on the wall tool, hold down the space bar and hover over the slab with the cursor until you find a hot point or tick, the wand will turn black and BAM, you have walls on your slab.



other odd icons,

• camera = ?

• white arrow = ?

* trident (3-pronged pitch fork) = marquee tool

movies

VR scenes

VR objects

shortcuts/quick keys

shortcut keys:

F2 • 2D plan view
F3 • 3D view
ctrl-d • drag
ctrl-e • rotate
ctrl-u • multiply

tips

feet-inches:
when typing in a wall, for example, it is not necessary to type in: 10'6". you can type in: 10-6, and archicad will convert it to 10'6". this will save you lots of time.

the basics

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rendering tips

trees:
trees take up a lot of rendering time. each leaf has to be rendered seperately, so for an average size tree, having 5000 leaves, archicad has to take the extra time to render each leaf as a seperate polygon. it can take forever if you put trees in your model. without them, your house looks unrealistic and the scene lacks depth.
the solution:
use bitmap trees. essentially bitmap trees are cardboard cutouts of actual trees. the background even shows through the branches, just like a real tree. they need to be placed perpendicular to the camera angle before rendering; otherwise they would look narrow and askew or even just like a line, in parallel to the viewer/camera angle. it's pain to move each tree for different views. you can just have different trees for different layers and turn off the ones you don't need in the current render. note: when using the "hand" sketch render option, bitmap trees will appear as rectangles. i have real trees on a seperate layer that i turn on only for "hand" sketches.

cool things

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books and tutorials

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resouces

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