Some interesting undocumented features in ArchiCAD 15

I came across a fascinating post recently on Shoegnome, a great blog about using BIM (specifically ArchiCAD) in practice by Jared Banks, the ArchiCAD reseller in Minnesota. If you aren’t familiar with his website, I suggest you check it out and bookmark it since he adds new posts frequently.

Jared writes:

“Most of us have read about ArchiCAD 15 on the ArchicadWiki. If you want a refresher, read this and also the official changes guide. Many of us are even using ArchiCAD 15 on a daily basis and enjoying the new features like the shell tool and the 3D editing planes.

But have you also read this list from the [ArchiCAD-Talk] forum: Undocumented Changes in V15.

There are a lot of little tweaks in every version of ArchiCAD that don’t get top billing. Or any billing at all. I’m excited about a dockable quick layers palette, but that’s not marketable news. Neither are the little tweaks to improve scripting in GDL. But some of this is huge and exciting for us nerdy, obsessive users.”

MY FAVORITES

There are several features that I noticed in the Forum discussion that I think are pretty useful:

• There is now direct feedback on the length of an arc (chord and true arc length) in the tracker, which will make it much easier to input certain types of property line data
• In the Info Box, you can input roof slope in degrees, % slope, or rise over run (e.g. 5′ in 12′)
• The background Autosave is now much faster, and can be set to Ultra Safe (save each step)
• When you eye-drop an object, the node point you click on is set to be the insertion point
• Browsing PLN files as well as library parts now shows a preview image in the Finder (finally)

I hope you found this useful. Let me know…