Interview—Patrick May Talks About His Journey with ARCHICAD and GDL Scripting

Generally speaking, scripting architecture design tools is hard. But it can be made a lot easier and Patrick May appears to have found a pathway to making it so.

So how did he do it and why is his method of value? As one might explain it, chances are high that if his sessions at this year’s 2017 BIMCON were popular it likely had a lot to do with his background of not being a “programmer type.” He will quickly admit that there are far more advanced GDL scripters out there than he.

Patrick May, bearded and unassuming, wearing clothes that felt a bit retro and with a steady and quite demeanor, sat as sturdy as a 60-year old Harvard archeology professor before his session at BIMCON. Except, May is an obvious Millennial. I didn’t know where he was from but if I had to take a wild guess I would have said Portland, Oregon.

That turned out to a bit accurate.

A graduate of the University of Oregon, May’s architecture school experience—as the reader will learn below—almost sounds quaint. If he found computing in architecture later than others, he quickly made up for it. Intrigued by his successful approach to GDL learning and his general mastery of ARCHICAD, I spoke to him at length after his session at BIMCON. Here’s what he had to say, about his journey to ARCHICAD and the value he places on mastering GDL (Geometric Description Language).

The Interview

(Architosh) So in the presentation, you said you have been using ARCHICAD for ten years, when did you first start?

(May) Yeah, I started in early 2006. I graduated from the University of Oregon. About five or six months before I graduated I started doing a job search, and I came across a small firm on the Oregon coast; I had never heard of ARCHICAD before that. And I went in for an interview, and they showed me ARCHICAD 8.1, and they handed me a disc and said: “you can play around with this in demo mode and see what you can do.” So I kludged my way through it, didn’t understand it, but got good enough to get the job.

How long did you work there?

I worked there about three years. It was a small firm, mostly residential a little bit of preservation work and we used ARCHICAD, and I learned it; I like to think I mastered it at that point—the three years—and became really proficient at it and that was around 2008 or 2009 when the market just fell out. The next job I got was at a firm as their ARCHICAD expert—they were transitioning from AutoCAD and I came in as their in-house expert trainer and trying to help them roll their projects into ARCHICAD. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

From there I moved onto Walker Warner Architects out in San Francisco. I worked there as—well the design title was Digital Design Coordinator—it was actually kind of a BIM manager lite role where I was their in-house ARCHICAD expert/manager/troubleshooter. I worked there for three years. And then for the last few months, I’ve been on my own as I started up my consultancy called 4dProof and I do ARCHICAD training, consulting, template building, light-weight object development and then just a little bit of freelance work.

My primary work is still with Walker Warner Architects. I’m working as their freelance CAD/BIM manager remotely.

How big is Walker Warner Architects?

Walker Warner—well things can always be in flux, but—they are usually between 40 and 50 people. They have, I believe, 35 ARCHICAD licenses now, so they have a lot of people working on ARCHICAD, and their work is primarily residential work, though they do occasional winery jobs and things like that. It’s fun work, really high-end stuff.

Is your business located in the San Francisco area too?

Not anymore. That’s one of the reasons why I’m working remotely, Walker Warner wanted me as a consultant rather than a salaried employee, and that’s the direction I wanted to go as well. So we moved away from the Bay area when we had our fourth child. We moved back to Oregon, just south of Portland.

So three years is what you are saying it took you to dive in and become an ARCHICAD expert—that’s impressive.

Well, I would say I went from the guy asking all the stupid ARCHICAD questions in that first office to the guy being asked all the questions—probably in about six months. At the time, just being fresh out of school and being eager to learn everything I could and being more adept at learning software at that younger age, it didn’t take quite as long.

Now that I’m specialized in training people in the software I see it’s quite mixed. Some people pick it up quite quickly like I did, and some people take months or even a couple of years to the point where they feel confident and proficient at it.

Did you have BIM training before that?

No, I had not heard of ARCHICAD, or Revit, or of many things. In school I used a little bit of formZ, I used a little bit of SketchUp, I used a little bit of AutoCAD, but primarily I did a lot of hand-drawing and physical models in [architecture] school.

What school again did you say you went to?

University of Oregon.

Wow. A lot of hand drawings and a little bit of technology…

Well, it was back in 2006, and nobody talked about BIM back then. It seemed sort of an aside and on the fridge of what people were looking at. So, it wasn’t brought into schools at the time. At least not at the University of Oregon or any other architecture schools that I knew of. 3D was something that some people did really well, and some people didn’t do it at all. The University of Oregon was great because they didn’t cram anything at you.

And I saw from your presentation today you are a Mac user.

I am a Mac user. I am totally comfortable on both Mac and PC, but I definitely prefer a Mac. I’m looking to get a bit more up-to-speed on PCs because some of the new real-time rendering engines out there are only on Windows at the moment. And I do some work that requires some rendering and ARCHICAD is good for that. But if you want a great rendering you need to go to some of the dedicated advanced rendering tools. And I’ve been looking at experimenting with Lumion and some of the programs like that.

What drew you to GDL? This is your area of expertise now, but you are not a programming type, as you say.

Yeah, I don’t program, and I won’t make any pretense of being a scripting genius. It developed out of necessity. Walker Warner, they are very specific on their needs and what they want within their model and what they want to use that model for. So, in the time I was there in-house, and continually with them now, as an independent consultant with them, it’s a monthly thing where I am re-evaluating the library and building it up, repairing some objects, etc.

So they have gone from 150 or so custom objects in their library to having multiple BIMserver libraries, and we may now be up over 1000 custom objects in our libraries. And it is because everything is so custom-built and so high-end that if they specify a faucet, they want to see what that will look like because they will do a high-end quality rendering of that bathroom to make sure that is the right fixture.

So I got into scripting largely out of necessity and largely out of interest. There are a lot of guys who do some really interesting things out of really flexible parts, and I wanted to be a part of that and bring that to Walker Warner’s toolbox. So it wasn’t a job requirement that I knew how to script in GDL, but it has made things easier for project teams.

And at that firm, these are high-end residential projects and do they do them all in full BIM?

Yes. I would maybe say it is the light-end of BIM. They are not scheduling a lot of stuff, but we do a lot of coordination at Walker Warner, we do a lot of IFC work. So we are sending models out to the structural engineer or the metal fab guys, and those guys are building their models around that. And we are doing some 3D coordination now. But it is definitely not a full BIM workflow. We don’t have the BIM protocols; we don’t have the ownership controls of who is doing what.

If you could make GDL better, what would you like to see?

next page: Making GDL Better and More on BIM

Oh gosh. Well, I know there is a lot of talk about making it more of a graphic interface, maybe incorporating different attributes into it. There definitely are some things I’d like to see, and it appears it is already moving in that kind of direction. I would like to see things like building materials as an attribute available to GDL, which we are right on the cusp of having that available. Things like custom profiles in GDL would be good. And again that is something that looking forward it seems like we will be getting there soon.

So this would be handling curved objects, correct? Like in your learning session you brought in a SketchUp model that was a curved light fixture, but there were zillions of lines of GDL code for its shape because it was converted to a morph object. And you said if you had hundreds of these in your project it would be hugely inefficient.

Right, I would take that SketchUp part and use it more as a reference. You know like point-cloud technology, it’s great you can do a scan of a building, but you can’t use that scan for anything but a reference to your actual model. I would do the same thing with that SketchUp object; I would say [in ARCHICAD] it is of this shape and size and maybe in an elevation and plan figure out a resolved profile as a more efficient script.

So in ARCHICAD it would be a shell?

Yeah, it would just be a resolved shell.

Right, it would be so much shorter regarding GDL scripting.

Right, I forget what object now I was talking about, but it would be like a dozen lines of script versus say around 800 lines of script. So it would be a lot more efficient. For the most part, like in a high-end residential project, even if you had like 50 of those chandeliers fixtures, it wouldn’t bog down most Macs or say newer Macs [running ARCHICAD], so I wouldn’t worry about it.

So a lot of what I do for Walker Warner is model efficiency work because their work is so complex and actually their models can get big—some of their models are up to 3 gigs on the teamwork server.

Wow, and that’s without the heavy scheduling of BIM data you mentioned earlier?

Yes, pretty tame scheduling. It’s just really [the load from geometric] model content. So their objects need to be as efficient as possible. The reason why their models are so large is that they model a lot of detail. It’s not necessarily because they have like one object that is eating up all that [memory] space it just that they have a ton of little parts. They use the ideal workflow of starting from a schematic model and working up to high levels of detail, but by the time we get to late DD phase on their projects we are looking at finishes and fixture, and so we are getting all of those elements into the model. We are looking at things like outlet locations and coordinating that with structure. So we are modeling a lot of stuff that have a lot of polygons.

Do they model even hard or software flashing systems in envelope development?

No, not quite to that level of detail for the most part. And a lot of what I do is taming that stuff back, saying “do we need this in the model or can it be this simpler thing? It’s difficult to keep an 3 GB teamwork file functioning and operational without the incessant “beach balling” that you get. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of oversight. So that’s where those library parts have to come into play.

Anything specific that makes things slow down?

Yes, we find it a lot with visualization with things like trees and plants and stuff like that. A lot of times we have to take that back because we put more and more polygons into those trees, and we want to do that rendering, but it’s going to take 18 hours even with CineRender. So that’s when we tame that back and replace it with some Photoshop post-processing work instead.

You made the point today about simplifying the surfaces of things and in another presentation, yesterday folks were noting the process of going from ARCHICAD to SketchUp where the design has been taken down to a simple surface model so you can do things in Sefaira with daylighting and energy analysis.

Yeah, that’s one of the values of making these objects custom. A lot of times an ARCHICAD object will have a 3D projection. Sometimes that ties to the model view options sometimes not. Sometimes you just have control in the settings to say “how detailed is this, is it basic, is it detailed, is it off?” So just being able to script something simple like that to say I only need 15 polygons for this faucet it just has to be this shape. If it’s a simple shape I only get 15 polygons, if it’s a detailed shape I get 350 polygons, and for my documents and normal working I can just toggle that to the “basic” setting, and if I want to do a rendering, I toggle on “detailed.”

What percentage of ARCHICAD users get into scripting like you do? What do think?

I believe it is a very small percentage. I couldn’t tell you for sure. I believe that this is the third or fourth time I have presented the way I do GDL. And it seems everyone there is maybe saving out a custom object but not doing anything with it.

It seemed like very high interest though. You had a big room, and it was filled with people.

Yeah, actually I was surprised. GDL is a no-go to most firms and I was surprised that the presentation got accepted at all, but then they asked me to have two sessions—there was so much interest. So, I think there are a lot of individuals here at least interested in learning how to get into the basics of this.

And I was encouraged talking to some of the people after hearing about their struggles. They are the same struggles that I deal with all the time. But getting through those things makes things so much better on the back end. Even if it takes you an hour to get this library part just right, that saves hours and hours of reusing that down the road.

So there is clearly pay-off.

There is absolute, to quality library management. And that’s really where the emphasis was today, not just saving out but saving and editing. If you just are saving objects out that is great that you can use that for visualization, but if you want to use that for documentation, if you want the versatility of being able to change that object without distorting things, then you have to get into a little bit of scripting. And I hope that’s what people are a little excited about.

 

Editors Notes

ARCHICAD users interested in learning GDL scripting can look at GRAPHISOFT’s online references here. Those interested in Patrick May’s consulting options can learn more about him at 4dProof.com. Also, Architosh highly recommends architects interested in a beautiful portfolio of finished work check out Walker Warner Architect online.