On Land

It may happen that you would like to manually hack Archicad's recent files list. Recent projects are shown in the Start Archicad dialog box when AC launches. Recent projects and library parts are shown at File -> Recent Documents. One good reason to prune this list is that you can get apparent-duplicate items if you open a files from different locations, such as a server v. a local folder. Another reason is if you change servers and you need to make sure the recent items have the right address.

These are OS X instructions. We use the free utility Pref Setter to edit plist files. On Windows, use whatever Windows users use.

The AC preference files are at [home]/Library/Preferences/. There are a number of AC prefs; the one we want is com.graphisoft.AC .plist. You can right-click on the file and choose Open With... Pref Setter, or open the file from Pref Setter's File Menu.

The Pref Setter window will present all the 'Keys' in the plist file. Scroll to Recent Files.

Projects are listed first: Plan File_1., Plan File_2.,... You can delete any of these items. You can also modify the path in the Value field, to point to a different server, for example. Following the projects themselves, there is a Plan FileType_ item for each project. If you are deleting project items, you can delete these items as well, or not. It doesn't matter. Following that is a Plan Number item. This value is set automatically; you can ignore it.

After all the project list information, there is a similar arrangement for recent library parts that have been created or opened for editing. In this context the word 'Symbol' means library part: Symbol File_1., Symbol File_2.,... You can delete or hack these exactly like the project items.

(There are also integer keys for the number of RecentPlans (projects) and RecentObjects (library parts) you would like to see in the list. These are set to 12 by default, perhaps you would like more or fewer.)

We had to do some of this recently when we moved our projects, libraries, modules, etc. to a new server with a different address. When AC launches, it will try to make sure the recent files are accessible. This may lead to a prompt to log in to the missing server. Or, if the password for the server is stored in the user's keychain, the old server volumes can mount without you noticing it. Next comes confusion about where you are actually working, which is never good. Tip: Delete the password to the old server in Keychain Access. That way, you will be notified when AC wants to go looking where it shouldn't and you need to hack your prefs.

(To be honest, even after carefully working through this, I have seen AC mysteriously seek out the old volumes. There's some glitchy behavior going on, but it seems to settle down over time. We do what we can.)

Dwight Atkinson follows up his expert treatment of LightWorks in Archicad with The Artlantis Attitude. Dwight provides plenty of technical detail and strong opinion, while never losing sight of the professional and artistic goals of rendering production. You should buy this book and then you should read it.

The Artlantis Attitude is being distributed as a personalized PDF file. If you are skeptical you can contact Dwight directly at info.beginnernomore@telus.net to ask for a sample, and he's easy to find on Archicad-Talk. You can buy the book from various outlets that would show up in Google, or you can Paypal US$85 to that address.

The 3D printing consultant was fine with our 3D DXF until he got to the grade mesh. He requested that we send him an STL file, which we did not know what was. It is a 3D Stereolithography file and it's common in 3D apps. Archicad doesn't support it for export. We tracked down an open-source app called MeshLab which saves STL. It does not, however, open DXF. It does open 3DS. So we saved as 3DS from Archicad, opened that in MeshLab, saved as STL, done. From illiteracy to FTP upload complete in about three minutes. MeshLab is free and runs on OS X, Linux, and Windows.

Pen 50 is the poché pen. It is gray (80% +/- I think) in model and layout pen sets. It should be the background color of any cut fill in new construction. (Existing condition elements are white.)

That said, one of the advantages of pen sets is having black+grayscale output while the much more colorful model pens help you stay organized. So we have an alternate poché pen, #70, which is sort of tealy in model but looks exactly like pen 50 in layouts.

The original intent for this pen was to distinguish multi-story walls (then new in Archicad 10) from their single-story brethren. I don't use multi-story walls as a rule, but I like them for elevators. In any case, the color difference reminds the use that when you edit this element there will be consequences on remote stories.

Lately I've been using them for other distinctive conditions.

Modeling walls. For example, walls on the layer A Wall3 are usually needed to get a dormer to close in model. The color reminds you they don't inject their misleading selves into the output plans.

Complicated 'patching' profiles. The color makes clear where the profiles meet the conventional elements.

Every viewpoint has a name and an ID. The name is important and is often used for output. The ID is never used for output, but wherever possible we use the ID to help organize the project map and view map.

For viewpoints with with a marker, the name and ID appear in the Info Box and settings dialog. This applies to section, elevations, details, and interior elevations. (And worksheets, in theory, though in our usage worksheets usually don't have markers.)

For all viewpoints, the name and ID appear at the bottom of the Navigator under the Properties heading. Viewpoints with fixed IDs, such as stories, will have the ID field in gray.

The behavior of IDs varies among the viewpoint types, so here's a cheat sheet.

Stories have unique, fixed IDs based on the order of stories. They are ugly. We ignore them.

Section and Elevation IDs are created by the user, and they need not be unique, but the name/ID combination must be. (If you try to create a section/elevation with an identical name and ID, AC will automatically append a number to the ID.) Sections and elevations should have an ID roughly corresponding to their sheet number. Building elevations and sections get A2-1, A2-2, etc., and wall sections get A3-1, A3-2, etc. For sections, add a letter to indicate the direction the section is facing. Don't put the direction in the name. For 'Junk' sections, used for modeling support and not for output, the ID should be xn where n is a number. (Yes, junk sections should usually be sections, not elevations.) So you end up with a section list of output viewpoints at the top, followed by all the junk.

Interior Elevation IDs should start with A5. I like to use the ID to sort the interiors by story: Basement is A5-0, first floor is A5-1, etc. Like the sections and elevations, the actual output sheet may differ. The sorting is to help you know where to look in the view map.

Detail IDs need not be unique. (In AC10 and earlier, they had to be.) Still, it's a good habit to make them distinctive. I find it helpful to use the detail ID to give the 'category' of detail. For example, a bunch of eave details will have IDs of Eave01, Eave02, etc. The assembly type details have Type01, Type02, etc. Structure detail IDs start with S_ followed by a number. For all details, the name should be presentable for the automatic drawing title.

Worksheets are a new, mostly redundant viewpoint type in AC11. We could easily live without them, but since they exist, we park all the straggly non-detail drawing things there. There aren't enough worksheets in a typical project to worry about sorting the list, so I recommend leaving the ID blank and just using the name.

Schedules, too, aren't abundant enough to sort. Leave the ID blank.

Cameras and paths have unique IDs that can't be changed.

Summary: Viewpoint IDs are not used for output, so use them to help sort the lists. Names are used for output: Use the name you want to see on the paper.

The IDs that do matter for output are those of the layout book items; subsets, layouts, and drawings.

Drawing IDs are usually generated by the layout, either by the grid or the order of drawings in the layout book tree.

Layout IDs are usually generated by the subset.

Subset IDs are set by the user, and the subset ID becomes part of the layout ID.

Views also have IDs, but they should typically inherit the viewpoints' IDs, so the lists will appear the same to us. All view IDs can be customized or set to 'None', but you can usually just leave them be. In the templates, I have deleted all the IDs for story (plan) views, because stuff like "-1. Basement" looks idiotic.

What? I know how to open a file! Jeez!

OK. Just in case:

Always open AC files via right click -> Open With or by dragging the file to requisite AC icon on the dock. I do the dock thing; I'm just not a context menu person usually.

Most important, don't double-click PLNs. Double-clicking will only give consistent, predictable results if you have exactly one copy of AC on your machine.

When you install a new version of AC, as you soon will in the form of 11, that version becomes the default application for opening PLNs. So you double-click your AC10 project, it opens in 11, you don't notice the difference because there isn't much, you save it, and next time you try to open it in 10 it doesn't work. (Yes, backsave. Real convenient.)

Always keep current versions of AC on the dock. Even if you use the right-click method, the dock gives you visual confirmation that the right application is being used.

Graphisoft gives poor support in this area, by making the icons identical and naming each version, precisely, "Archicad".

Double-clicking files is one of those 'automatic' things that's great if you can trust it, but when it's not predictable it makes trouble. It's not just AC either, recently my .docs started opening in Pages for some reason.

What about that 'Change All' under Open With in the Get Info window? That fixed my .doc issue, but it doesn't reliably assign the right 'Archicad' version.

So, right-click or dock. If you have a bad habit here, change it now before 11 starts getting on your nerves.

Update re app icons: Mr. Briggs to the rescue.

Homeworkers: When's the last time you took home the office Library Container File?

The library is always changing and the LCF is updated every Monday at the very least.

A slabified window is easy, considering it's a window and windows are hard. Build up a few slabs of varying thicknesses and IDs and you're done.

But it's tedious to set all the thicknesses and IDs, right?

How about a module of slabs preset to the proper settings? Then it's just a matter of option-clicking and magic-wanding each part.

You can arrange the slabs so they resemble a window section to help you remember what's what. And, yes, you can call out the parts with text, too, right.

I put one of these for a 2x6 wall at 3 Resources / Modules / Window Slabify.mod. Other wall types would vary but it's a start.

This is so trivial/obvious that I hesitate to point it out.

You can't rotate a conventional beam element about the long axis. (Why? Dunno.) But you can rotate profile beams. So you just need a rectangular profile.

But if it's so obvious, why isn't there such a profile in the default templates, among the faux-proof-of-concept distorted steel shapes? And why wasn't there one in our templates until yesterday? Dunno that either.

Archicad 10 offers a new all-in-one library file format, the Library Container File or LCF. In Archicad 9, you could use a PLA archive file as a library. LCFs are pure library stuff, with no model space or attributes.

It is allegedly faster to load the libraries as a single large file than from folders full of folders full of individual objects. But I must say in my informal testing I haven't observed a dramatic difference among loading library folders, PLAs, and LCFs.

In addition, there's at least one characteristic of LCFs (and archives) that is disadvantageous. You can't save objects into them. So no new objects and no editing. (You could view this as an advantage from a standards point of view; nobody can mess anything up.)

In other words I considered using an LCF for the Rill & Decker Standard LIB but decided against it. There's no change in everyday library management.

But! There's a huge advantage to the LCF in one specific case: Copying libraries to a flash drive to take them home. The R&D library is about 15MB. Copying its 1300 or so items to a USB 2.0 drive takes over two minutes. Copying the same library as a 15MB LCF takes, drum roll, three seconds.

It also takes the guesswork or other syncing strategies out of keeping your home copy of the library up to date. Just bring the LCF home and overwrite the old file.

So I'm providing the library as an LCF for this purpose. The file lives at 2 Libraries / Library Container Files. I will do my best to update it when anything important changes. This is pretty often, so make sure you check it regularly.

You still need to manage project libraries manually.

When they mashed up PlotMaker with Archicad, they had to make views-in-layouts into proper elements, rather than flaky PM things. So we have the Drawing element, which can be edited as a polygon, assigned favorites, and given a marker, all of which makes the mashed up AC views-in-layouts much more pleasant than their ancestors.

But drawings aren't just for views; You can use them for PDFs. They're not just for layouts; you can place them in any model window.

And finally, you can use them to place DWGs. Rather than opening or XREFing the DWG, you can drag and drop it from the Finder directly into a model window, where it becomes a drawing. If you just need a DWG for tracing or reference, this is the way.

When you drop the drawing, the only question you have to answer concerns the units. Use 1 inch. If the drawing is 12 times too small (I think that's how it works), drop it again and choose 1 foot.

A few other points:

• A big advantage of the drawing method is there's no layer contamination.

• Drawings placed in this way can be updated, just like view drawings, and will appear in the drawing manager.

• The drawing will come in with the default settings of the drawing tool (though there will be no title). As for the pen set, use '*Layout', which is overwhelmingly black and works for most DWGs.

• If you're placing DWGs for use in output, more pen management is likely in order, which is another topic.

• Tip: Put the drawing on a remote story and set that story to ghost. Now you can work normally without accidentally selecting the DWG.

There are the layer combinations for work and the layer combinations for output. In the past, the output LCs have had all their layers locked. The only reason for this was make clear to the user that they're not in a working combination. Not a critical point but there it is.

Now there's a stronger reason to have the layers unlocked in output LCs. In AC10, you can right-click on a drawing and choose 'Open source View' to, right, open the source view. (In AC/PM9, this command existed but it never worked as far as I could tell.)

If you are viewing a drawing and see something that needs fixing, you can open the view and get right to it. So the layer locking should get out of the way.

In the architectural LCs, all the visible layers are unlocked. In the specialized plans (electrical, e.g.), only the special layers are unlocked.