GRAPHISOFT announces new ArchiCAD 20—Fresh Look at BIM

Hungary-based Graphisoft has introduced the latest version of its award-winning BIM (Building Information Modeling) software for architects and designers in the AEC industry. The latest version focuses in on areas of improvement that emphasize the “I” in BIM, increasing the value for both ArchiCAD users and stakeholders alike.

“The true potential of BIM is that it can hold all the necessary information for designing, constructing and operating buildings,” said Peter Temesvari, Director of Product Management at GRAPHISOFT. “A significant part of this information is non-geometrical data.  ArchiCAD 20 offers powerful workflows to manage, visualize and exchange such information with any stakeholder participating in the design and construction process.”

01 – The new graphical user-interface (GUI) improvements in ArchiCAD 20 streamline the workflow process as well as provide a feel more akin to mobile apps. Moreover, the main work window is arguably the largest inside any rival BIM program on the market.

Additionally, the company has also made the first significant user-interface design changes in years, aimed at making ArchiCAD 20 feel much more akin to how modern mobile applications work and feel.

What’s New in ARCHICAD 20

Enhanced Information Management

• Store the Information: Information is the most valuable part of BIM and ArchiCAD 20 helps architects and designers get the most of it! ArchiCAD 20 allows users to utilize their Building Information Model as the central storage place for all related information. They can even easily store and maintain design information that was not created using CAD or BIM tools, like Excel spreadsheets.
• Display the Information: ArchiCAD 20 leverages well-structured information resulting in informative design visualization, which ensures enormous efficiencies throughout design and construction. With the help of smart filters and brand new graphical override, designers can freely change the representation of any 2D and 3D views of elements with similar properties. This feature allows a number of workflows that make communication, coordination and model checking much more efficient.
• Share the Information: ArchiCAD 20 is among the first BIM applications to fully support the IFC 4 open-source standard. IFC 4 supports new coordination workflows (Design Transfer View and Reference View) and provides great help when coordinating with other disciplines. Information sharing via purpose-made tools such as BIMx or generic tools such as Excel enables a much wider target group to get involved and use the wealth of information stored in BIM.

Graphical Favorites

Brand new Graphical Favorites provide excellent visual feedback about saved element settings with automatically-generated, colored 2D or 3D thumbnail previews — available instantly for every Tool. This not only helps BIM managers in setting up and enforcing office project templates, but also speeds up everyday design development work.

Renewed Graphical User Interface

ArchiCAD 20 features a completely revamped graphical user interface, making it the most modern-looking BIM application available on the market today. The design language used on the renewed GUI gives ArchiCAD 20 a look and feel much closer to mobile apps than the traditional desktop software, making it especially appealing to the younger generation.

For more information about ArchiCAD 20, visit www.archicad.com

GRAPHISOFT ArchiCAD 20 will start shipping in June, 2016, with an impressive list of 27 local versions rolled out by the end of Q3 2016

Architosh Analysis

I once had a discussion with Viktor Várkonyi, CEO, of Graphisoft, about why companies don’t provide dramatic new GUIs for their applications to keep up with the times. He said at that time it was because users need to stay functional and big changes like that are disruptive. Then how do developers modernize GUIs? Well, this update in ArchiCAD 20 is at the very least Graphisoft’s contemporary answer. The company is right—architects and designers do want as large a canvass as possible to work on and the new GUI helps both in this direction and the flexible stretchy nature of the palettes is quite nice.

02 – Graphical over-rides allow the user to change the visual qualities of elements in the BIM model based on user-definable filters. The method can be used for various purposes.

The new graphical over-rides features are also some of the more intriguing changes to this version of ArchiCAD. Their flexibility is the sweet-spot of their power. Based on various user-defined data, graphical over-rides can change the visual qualities of the BIM model or portions of the BIM model in views to “graphically” communicate various aspects of the project.