0 ArchiCAD 9 3D for architects: part I

ArchiCAD 9 arrived with what at first I thought they were small improvements. But add up to a lot, especially for 3D visualisation work, and work on a laptop with a cramped screen (Figure 1). The latter situation can occur often now that ArchiCAD supports the terminal server technology that enables you to work on the Internet from a remote location.

This new release also benefits from improvements in DWG compatibility and an improved search system that allows library symbols to be found by name (Figure 2). About 2,600 symbols are included in libraries supplied with the software.

Text input and display are improved. Users can grab the dimension text with visible handles to move and edit and paste even entire blocks of text formatted by most word processor (Figure 3). All this is particularly important for the market of ArchiCAD architects, builders, designers and managers of facilities (there is a special version of ArchiCAD for FM). Among the majors, full-featured (and we need to add expensive) CAD packages, ArchiCAD and Nemetschek's Allplan are specifically intended for the market. Bentley and Autodesk add an architectural interface to their products. ArchiCAD gives much more power than the architectural design software package, but it's still easy, flexible and intuitive to use.

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