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Residential BIM - Vectorworks


jcaia

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My partner and I are architects (we also have a structural engineer with us) who contracted to consult with a large home builder (14 locations, 4 states - just over 1k homes a year) and control their design-thru-drafting-thru-engineering using mostly their own staff of drafters (14 of them) for every day CONDOCs.  They used Chief Architect (all 3D) before I arrived and my partner and I primarily used Vectorworks, but admittedly did most our CONDOC's in 2D.  In fact, we even did most our presentation work in Sketchup and Lumion. 

 

I'm pressing the company to move away from Chief Architect into a more solid and robust BIM platform and we started exploring Vectorworks, Archicad, and Revit.  We are favoring Archicad right now (Revit is 100% out), since combined with Cadimage the package seems more user friendly to US residential architecture.  Admittedly, I haven't completed a fully 3D BIM project in Vectorworks as I get frustrated with certain things pretty quickly.  I have completed commercial projects that were hybrid BIM/2D - which worked fine....but for residential I found myself mainly drawing in 2D.  However, the solution I need for this builder needs to be 100% model/BIM based for all sorts of reasons.

 

Obviously, Vectorworks and Archicad are owned by the same parent company so I feel this type of thread is appropriate here to ask if anyone out there has any input on the subject of (traditional styles) residential 3D BIM inside Vectorworks...?  

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I do residential and light commercial - and model everything in VW, including the site and the 2d detailing work. These latter two areas alone are where I find ArchiCAD falls over, and I've found modelling in VW so much more direct and intuitive as well - especially for structural members.

I also find its the little things - like add surface and clip surface, then extrude or convert to slab to name one, that speed up my work; I find Archicad's workflow arduous. V2021 made a number of great usability tweaks - the only major gripe I have left is updating viewports - which will hopefully evaporate once Redshift integration comes along.. 

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3 hours ago, Aspect_Design said:

I do residential and light commercial - and model everything in VW, including the site and the 2d detailing work. These latter two areas alone are where I find ArchiCAD falls over, and I've found modelling in VW so much more direct and intuitive as well - especially for structural members.

I also find its the little things - like add surface and clip surface, then extrude or convert to slab to name one, that speed up my work; I find Archicad's workflow arduous. V2021 made a number of great usability tweaks - the only major gripe I have left is updating viewports - which will hopefully evaporate once Redshift integration comes along.. 

Thank you for that feedback.

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