News – Page 14 – Eric Bobrow's ARCHICAD News, Tutorials and Resources

Awards for Graphisoft EcoDesigner product, Urban Trees (ArchiCAD user)

GRAPHISOFT EcoDesigner gets “HAMMERED” – Environment Wins

Budapest, December 16

GRAPHISOFT has received the Environmental Product of the Year award for its EcoDesigner product at the annual Construction Computing Magazine awards held in London on November 19. Known as “THE HAMMERS,” the awards are now in their fourth year and are widely regarded as the industry’s leading accolade. This year, over 7,500 votes in 21 categories were received from the readers of Construction Computing Magazine.

Award-Winning ‘Urban Trees’ Development Rejuvenates Seattle Block

BOSTON, Dec. 14, 2009

Architects have transformed a blighted Seattle lot into an award-winning commercial/residential complex featuring flexible “live-work” units, green design, and a plaza on which pedestrians and cars can coexist.

Designed with ArchiCAD building information modeling (BIM) software from Graphisoft, Urban Trees is a winner of an AIA Seattle “Future Shack” award recognizing progressive solutions for urban living.

New Book – Discover Smart BIM: An Interactive Guide to ArchiCAD

From the CadGarage website (where you can purchase the book):

Discover Smart BIM has just been released and will be in stock in about a week!

Discover Smart BIM is designed to guide the intended audience through simple steps to produce a complete ArchiCAD Virtual Building™ Model – covering the most important points such as modeling, visualization, detailing, scheduling and documentation.

Developed from more than a decade’s worth of training experience to meet a specific need within the ArchiCAD community. At the time of writing, there is no other known book-based publication that addresses the approach required to learn how to produce a complete ArchiCAD Virtual Building™ Model.

The book is written and presented in a graphically intensive format (244 page full color print/300+ color illustrations to provide clear and precise instructions for each stage of the Virtual Building™ modeling process.

The content of the book includes the following:

The ArchiCAD Interface – Explained

Chapter 1: Establishing the Base Building Layout
Chapter 2: Working with Stories Continue reading

Graphisoft Releases Google Earth (and SketchUp) Connections for ArchiCAD 13

Graphisoft has released the Google Earth Connections Add-On for ArchiCAD 13. With this multi-purpose tool architects can:

Open SketchUp files (up to version 7) as GDL objects
Save ArchiCAD models in SketchUp 6 format
Import objects into ArchiCAD from the Google 3D Warehouse (http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/)
Upload ArchiCAD models to Google 3D Warehouse
Import Google Earth locations with snapshots into ArchiCAD

Google Earth Connection for ArchiCAD 13 is available for the 32-bit Windows version of ArchiCAD 13. 64-bit and Mac versions are not available due to lack of Google API tools necessary to develop these functionalities.

Google Earth Connections for ArchiCAD 13 replaces the “SketchUp for ArchiCAD” Add-on, which is discontinued with ArchiCAD 13.

The download for the Google Earth Connection can be found at:
http://www.graphisoft.com/products/archicad/addons/google_earth/

The fully compatible Google Earth 5.0 program can be downloaded from this page:
http://earth.google.com/download-earth-advanced.html

ArchiCAD 13 Project ODBC Driver is Ready

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a widely accepted interface for database access. The ODBC Driver reads ArchiCAD project files and gives you database access to the content of these files. Using this tool you can extract and further process ArchiCAD project data in other applications.

The ArchiCAD 13 Project ODBC Driver is available for download from the following page: http://www.graphisoft.com/support/developer/downloads/

The corresponding documentation can be found on this page:
http://www.graphisoft.com/support/developer/documentation/

Note: The ODBC driver is available for Windows operating systems only.

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a widely accepted interface for database access. It is based on the Call-Level Interface (CLI) specifications from X/Open and ISO/IEC for database APIs and uses Structured Query Language (SQL) as its database access language. The ODBC Driver reads ArchiCAD project files and gives you database access to the content of these files. Using this tool you can extract and further process Archicad project data in other applications.

Bobrow’s Blog

This blog will include news on ArchiCAD, observations, tidbits from my personal life, interesting links and other tasty morsels. Stay tuned!