Users Speak out on Low Cost Conceptual Design Options

AECCafe Voice asked some users and vendors about their low cost conceptual design software to see what features are the most valuable to users in the workplace.

GRAPHISOFT ARCHICAD

Chad Duerre, owner and principal of Duerre Design, talked with AECCafe Voice about why he chose the low cost conceptual design software that he did.  Richard Beneke of Richard Beneke Designs wrote in about his history using two prominent CAD softwares, detailing his experiences with both.

“Having learned ARCHICAD years ago, it was a given that I’d stay with ARCHICAD when I began my own firm. As a residential home designer and a small business owner, I liked the ARCHICAD Solo option for financial and feature-based reasons. The full ARCHICAD license has features I really don’t need to use and Solo gave me a great option to model on a smaller scale.

I don’t need any other software and that is something that is very appealing. With other drafting programs you need modeling add-ons to do renderings. With ARCHICAD Solo, my cost effective solution works for me from step one of any project.

In the instances where I need to provide my model to engineers and architects, ARCHICAD Solo works very well.”

ARCHICAD Solo gives me the ability to create building-specific design, it is 3D modeling from the very first wall you put in. Other programs are not building-specific.” – Duerre

“GRAPHISOFT® ARCHICAD® Solo is a powerful BIM solution designed for a single practitioner or a small firm. As you design, ARCHICAD Solo captures all the information about your project in a central database from which the 3D model, 2D drawings, and documentation are quickly and efficiently produced. Intelligent model-based workflows for new construction, renovation, and retrofit projects provide automated, fully coordinated, and accurate documentation while eliminating costly, tedious re-work.

ARCHICAD Solo is a product based in the core engine and technology of ARCHICAD. It has the same toolset and performance capacity minus the ability for team working and the licensing of the C4D rendering engine.

With features such as a renovation filter, quantity and material takeoffs and 3D presentation app – BIMx, ARCHICAD Solo is all that’s needed for the creation of custom, high-end residential homes. Architects, sole practitioners, home builders and designers who rely on ARCHICAD Solo have the ability to create quantity take-offs and schedules for bills of materials. The software also allows for Passive House design – supporting full PHPP export.

ARCHICAD Solo is available as a perpetual software license.  Flexible pricing including lease finance are available for qualified purchasers.” – GRAPHISOFT

BricsCAD

From Richard Beneke, Richard Beneke Designs, cc, Benoni, South Africa, comes a case study of his experience with both AutoCAD and BricsCAD:

“I worked for many years for some of the major civil engineering contractors in South Africa on construction sites and in their in-house design departments. Our design was wide-ranging, from progress charts and office layouts to scaffolding and construction plant. About 20 years ago I started our own consulting engineering business, and our clients are mostly construction companies.

My earliest use of AutoCAD was around 1989, our hardware was a PC XT with 500 kb extra ram and 16-colour EGA monitor. We progressed through to version 11 around 1993 and began using 3D modelling (wireframe and faces) for some projects using vanilla AutoCAD.

I think that AutoCAD release 14 around 1998 was one of the most satisfying to use for its day. From then on, each release of AutoCAD had an increasing proportion of features that I did not need or use.   By 2009, more than 50% of the added features in the new release were of no use to me, hardware requirements went up rapidly and in our currency the cost of upgrades increased exponentially.

The release of AutoCAD 2012 was a turning point for me, with Autodesk requiring annual licensing, an increasing learning/discovery requirement with each new release, and myself struggling daily with unresolved bugs in the software.

I looked for alternatives that would suit a small 3-person business such as ourselves, where we do a great variety of drawing types. Our work ranges from civils to mechanical to structural, often all within one project, so the cost and learning curve of specialized CAD would be out of the question, and we needed a basic general purpose CAD package.

After testing of some products we settled on BricsCAD Platinum for our general 2D and 3D work.

BricsCAD is close to AutoCAD in its user interface, the user differences are, in my view a considerable improvement on AutoCAD as they have dropped some cluttered legacy dialogs or features and replaced them with a cleaner simpler interface.

BricsCAD has the advantage of recent newly written software code so that it runs better on lower spec hardware
or alternatively gives better performance on higher spec hardware.
BricsCAD Platinum is sufficiently undemanding that will run on an older notebook PC which I use at meetings and on site, and though the notebook has only 2GB RAM and Atom processor, BricsCAD will happily work in simple 2D and 3D drawings.

I have found the BricsCAD developers to be encouragingly responsive to bug reports and feature requests.
They respond to support requests (at no extra charge) within days, and the few bugs I have reported were fixed within a month or so.

Our difficulties with BricsCAD were mostly related to object selection methods, PDF printing and shading.  These have been resolved.

In the real world, no software is continually perfect.  For our work, BricsCAD offers a good balance between input effort (software cost, hardware needs, learning curve, ease of use) and output results (documents that effectively convey information to others).”

ARES Commander

While the German company Graebert GMBH did not offer user experiences, this is a notable CAD software that can be used for complex projects as well as basic drafting and design, with significant cost savings over more prominent CAD products on the market today. Their ARES Commander offers 2D and 3D tools for the creation and editing of DWG drawings: From company materials:

Any OS: ARES Commander can be installed on Windows, macOS or several Linux distributions

Buy 1 license and work from any computer: ARES Commander, the same user can work from up to 2 computers simultaneously and even log out to work from other computers. You may even use computers under different operating systems.

CAD anywhere: When you buy ARES Commander you also get a 1 year subscription for ARES Touch (to work on your Android and iOS devices) and ARES Kudo¹, our cloud-based solution.

Flexible and cost-effective licensing: Annual Plan, Perpetual license or Flex license (network), it is up to you! No pressure to force you to pay every year nor time limitation to buy an upgrade.

All included: When you buy ARES Commander it includes a 1 year subscription to receive all the updates, access our email support, ARES Kudo¹ and ARES Touch. After 1 year you are free to renew or not.

Some of ARES Commander’s key features include:

Native DWG support: We use .dwg as our main format. You can create and modify drawings in this popular format without any import nor export to keep the highest compatibility.

User-friendly environment: Nothing to learn if you already know about CAD. Just try and see: You will find a similar interface and can use the same commands and aliases.

Unique productivity features: Discover in our videos some new features that can boost your productivity.

Available in 14 languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean

Advanced programming interface: Developers will find a powerful API with support for various programming languages including C++, Tx, lisp, VSTA, DCL, Visual Studio, COM, Active X.

Tom Vollaro, senior product manager, AEC Generative Design, Autodesk, brought to our attention the product, Autodesk FormIt. Formit is a multi-platform conceptual BIM design tool that runs on web browsers, iPad, and Android, all for free. “We recently added a Pro subscription for $300US/year that enables some in-app features on web/mobile and also enables a Windows desktop version. The primary advantage over competitors is the tight connection with Revit,” said Vollaro. There is more info at http://formit.autodesk.com.

Do send in your personal experiences with low cost conceptual design and CAD options to Susan Smith susan.smith@ibsystems.com. It is interesting to learn users’ journeys with these products, and also how they might have solved specific problems. In many cases, a solution requires the use of more than one software, that could also be of interest to readers who are seeking a multi-pronged approach for their real world challenges.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, AutoCAD, BIM, building, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, engineering, Graebert, Graphisoft, infrastructure, reality capture, Revit, SketchUp

Categories: 2D, 3D PDF, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, Apple, apps, Archicad, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, engineering, IMSI/Design, rendering, site planning, SketchUp, sustainable design

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