Figure 1. A rendering of the University of Florida's Pathogen Research Facility building. It was created from an ArchiCAD 10 working model used to produce the construction documents and rendered solely in ArchiCAD 11, which took 5 minutes on a standard BIM workstation. Image courtesy of CUH2A and the University of Florida.

ArchiCAD 11 introduces concepts and methods that add flexibility to the process of virtual building design and documentation. New design features and improvements to existing tools make ArchiCAD 11 a better program for the world of building information modeling (BIM) (figure 1).

Worksheet Tool

Of all the new changes to ArchiCAD 11, the worksheet tool may be the most popular new tool for long-time ArchiCAD users. This feature allows users to place model views on a worksheet for easy editing in a drafting-type environment. It works somewhat similarly to the detail tool, but with worksheets, the annotation is replicated along with the model geometry (not so with a detail). Anything put on a worksheet can be manipulated with the 2D drafting tools. At any time, a user can update parts of a model's geometry manually, or even the whole model automatically.

Worksheets can be set up for the annotation of drawing views and delegated to a team's junior architects for work. When a user signs out a worksheet, all the elements contained therein are editable. The layers of the elements on the worksheet don't need to be signed out. The good news and the bad news here is that the 3D model elements can't be manipulated from a worksheet. And depending on your situation, that is very good news. The less-experienced users on a team can be delegated to editing worksheets, thereby ensuring the integrity of your model.

Multistory Hot-Linking

ArchiCAD 11

The task of hot-linking models has been simplified with the introduction multistory hot-linking. Previously, users had to hot-link each story individually. Depending on the size of a building, this task could be very tedious. With multistory linking, the whole building is imported in one operation.

If your model has fewer stories than the building you're hot-linking, that's OK. Nonexisting stories will be ignored. The missing stories can be added later. A simple update to the hot-linked module via the hot-link manager will bring the additional floors in from the hot-linked module.

This feature is a wonderful improvement for ArchiCAD model managers everywhere. But if users want to control each hot-link story individually, they can't; it's all or nothing. Why you would want to have individual story control in the hot-link manager, you ask? I don't know, but someone may miss it. In my opinion, this function brings ArchiCAD one step closer to an ideal virtual building environment.

It's All in the Details

The creation of detail boundaries and their callouts automatically generate a corresponding detail drawing. This concept and feature are essential in the BIM environment and have been around for a while now. But in real-world construction documentation, you don't always want this to happen. You want to be able to create unlinked detail callouts to accommodate for typical or similar building area situations or to serve as place markers for future drawings.

With ArchiCAD 11, users can place unlinked detail markers in the model. These markers can be easily assigned to existing detail drawing views later during the project. Users even can link them to elevations or section drawings, if they want to. The check markers palette was created to help manage unlinked detail marks in the project model.

One breakthrough in the tool is the ability to create details inside of details. This feature is my favorite improvement to an existing tool in ArchiCAD 11 because it simplifies the documentation process of detailing a single area at several different scales.