Chief Vs Autocad

[BuilderBen]

Well there you go then; for molding and cabinets use CA. For 12th century cathedrals use Archicad. Scott, any chance of ominous organ music in your vids (or at least some Jon Lord)

jon

It seems you could also use Archicad for airports...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0tUoYUue1U

Anyhow, I'm new here so hi all. I've used Archicad for a couple of years after ironically feeling Revit's 2D tools leaves some things to be desired, and am now looking to see if Chief could be a good fit. I'm 100% residential and still lack a couple of hundred of IDP hours before I can call myself an Architect. I will get there eventually, just got tired working for someone else for the moment.

Archicad is a great tool, but for pure residential work I feel it has a lot of options and open ended approaches that makes it a bit cumbersome to do the bread and butter stuff for typical homes. Mouldings and other practical aspects certainly seems very accessible in Chief. It also seems to have very solid support from all possible manufacturers. I'm getting a little nervous over some people's concern over some of the 2D tools though and I have still to get the hang of layout. Still got a couple of weeks on my trial but have studied a lot of videos.

Not wanting to kick a hornet's nest in my first post, but from reading some of the posts and threads here I get the feeling that perhaps the majority here are more design/builders as opposed to academically trained architects? Would that be a fair assumption? It seems that every time someone wishes for better 2D tools and features such as line profiles, fog, etc they often get shut down and told that it's not needed. I wonder if this view is shared by the developers of Chief, as I'm personally not looking for a pure builder's tool as such. What drew me to trying out Chief was fast conceptual possibilities.

Richard, not having spent too much time with Chief yet I would be very interested to hear more specifically what you think are cumbersome on the construction document side compared to AC?

Ben

[RMorrison]

Richard, not having spent too much time with Chief yet I would be very interested to hear more specifically what you think are cumbersome on the construction document side compared to AC?
Ben

Well, several things:
1) Schedules. Chief has difficulty with door/window/plumbing fixture schedules, etc. After you get used to highly customizable schedules in AC that can give you opening square footages, say, along with subtotals, it's hard to accept the limitations of Chief. In AC, anything can be scheduled. In Chief, not so much. At version X5, I am frustrated that I really can't a decent light fixture schedule out of Chief.

2) I have trouble with Chief's fill patterns not having a user definable origin for each instance. I depend on this for accurate tile layouts in elevations, especially.

3) Chief starts bogging down with lots of CAD elements. AC doesn't break a sweat. The user interface for drafting is very transparent. Find and Select elements is available, as well as easy group changes of different types of elements at one go.

4) Then there are lots of small things, like automatically generated drawing titles, linked reference bubbles that automatically update when a detail is moved, ability to display elements on upper AND lower floors, ability to make walls with multiple layers intersect correctly, absolutely accurate terrain models, etc.

To be fair, Chief has some advantages in the design stages; its cabinets are far superior to AC's, and I find the House Wizard very useful. You can throw together a model very quickly.

[lbuttery]

I find the House Wizard very useful

Richard:

interesting, not much chatter on the forum about this feature

I tried it back with ver 9.5 and found it wasn't for me
and have ignored it since then

if I was still in business I would have to check it out again
to see what I was missing

Lew