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Sutherland Architect |
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015394 34489
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Mon
31.03.03
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Asking around produced no definite recommendations, but a laptop with a mobile Nvidia graphics chip would have seemed the best solution.
Unfortunately it seems that - at least until Nvidia sort out their mobile FX chip - the Ati Radeon 9000 is the best mobile graphics platform.
Sony have recently introduced 2 very nice high-end graphics laptops and the lower priced model (aimed at 'gamers' apparently) the GRV616G actually has the higher spec graphics card (Radeon 9000 instead of the 7500 in the GRX616SP) - and at around £1200+vat (€2,000) is half the price of the GRX.
I was a bit nervous of using an Ati card but having installed Allplan v17.0a4 on this laptop, so far it works wonderfully well.
Nice one Sony :-)
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Sat
29.03.03
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A new security feature involving another code was not the problem in fact - just the 'old' one of the existing v17 license file will not work with 2003.
I'm sure it will all get sorted out on Monday.
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Wed
20.03.03
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| To
get round the problem of power supply in the AGP slot you need
to plug in a drive bay power supply to the back of the card (!). This allows the card to use both 4X and 8X AGP slots. I am told if you use an 8X AGP motherboard you can expect a 10-12% speed increase over 4X AGP. I have been running Allplan v17.0a4 on the board in my Dell Precision 530 with a 2GHz P4 Xeon, 1Gb ram and scsi hds under Win2k SP3. Yes, it is very, very fast in 3D but more importantly it has nice color rendering in the animation window. I have never been able to get a good, even color balance with the 3D Labs Wildcat cards (v2 and v3) in the animation window. The power of the card is in being able to have a high resolution display with anti-aliasing and lots of textures and still be able to whizz around in the animation window. I notice that hidden line removals are very fast also. 2D vector redraws are a shade slower than the Wildcat III I would say but anti-aliasing combined with the display list feature in v17 is a powerful combination. Anyway, Allplan runs with (so far) no problems at all on this card. Generally I notice that multiple windows open and close quicker than with the Wildcat cards and Windows itself seems a bit snappier. The card is expensive (around €2,000 in the UK) and while very impressive I would think that many users could get close to this performance using the cheaper Quadro cards or possibly even the much cheaper games versions. I am not sure if I will change from my Wildcat 6110 but it was kind of www.3dprographics.com to let me try it out ('racing driver for a day' sort of feel to this! :-) |
Allplan 2003 ? - still no sign of this. I guess it is the usual licence file wait.
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Wed
19.03.03
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There has been a lot going on with Allplan and related products in the background however and I should be able to post some news soon.
In the meantime I did find time to buy the wonderful new Sony Ericsson P800 mobile phone/pda. With the Opera browser installed it allows access to ordinary websites. Quite remarkable.
Update 23.03.03 - here is a good technical review of the P800
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Thurs
06.03.03
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Existing users will need to log in again.
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Mon
03.03.03
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More enhancements promised and Allplan 2003 should be with us just as soon as the licence files are sorted out.
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Wed
26.02.03
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I am not sure if US users have a private forum run by cadconsulting-usa but the official Nemetschek English language forum - the webboard - is very quiet these days. It is still a very useful resource for new users because of all the old posts still available to read. I have the impression that several international distributors may now run a private area on their websites for their own ssa/ssv users but I only know of the German one at Nemetschek.de for certain.
There is talk of setting up a UK-based forum but nothing definite yet.
I suspect that ssa/ssv users still tend to reach for the telephone first when they have a problem but you do learn a lot by reading about other users' experiences in forums... and it helps your language skills!
:-)
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Fri
21.02.03
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Fri
21.02.03
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This is a subject of great interest to new users and purchasers of new PCs and so (with apologies to the nemetschek webmaster) here is an approximate translation of the page - but refer to the original German faq if in doubt.
An official English version will, I am sure, be forthcoming soon.
There is an faq listed in all FAQs (see Wed note below) about a fix for a problem with Allplan v17 and Ati FireGL cards 8800/8700 and Rage 128 (fixed in Allplan 2003 it says).
One issue I have noticed with my Wildcat III 6110 is that you need to carefully tweak the configuration of the card in the Display, advanced settings or performance will be worse than with the Wildcat II 5000 (!).
There is no guidance on 'official' settings for Allplan and so by trial and error I have found that best performance comes when you set most or all of the onboard available memory to 'Offscreen Memory' in the Wildcat 6110.
OpenGL is an interesting subject. 3D Labs are working on a proposal for OpenGL2 but much work remains to be done before it could become a new standard. See 3d Labs page on OpenGL2.
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Wed
19.02.03
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Mon
17.02.03
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Sun
16.02.03
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Every software package has little glitches but you put up with them if you think that eventually they might be fixed.
How long do you wait?
Well, here is a little problem reported last year whereby the glass in windows does not align with the opening light for some reason. It is very embarrassing when clients spot this in an illustration but I guess it is not a priority for a fix - along with all the usual UK complaints.
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Sat
15.02.03
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I am not certain but I think it is just a bugfix for a CD version called 17.0b released by Nemetschek before Christmas - probably only in Germany.
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Tue
11.02.03
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Create a new project in Project Pilot with a name commencing with the ampersand symbol '&'.
When you exit Project Pilot, Allplan will open the new project and give a warning that you are running in Demo mode and saving is disabled (or to be more precise any data created while in Demo mode will be deleted once you exit the project).
Bring up the CAD Navigator (Ctrl+Q) if not already visible and look at all the modules now on display to try out.
Most intriguing is the module listed at the end of the Bonus Tools section - just under 'Smartfit' called Associative Views.
Interresant, non?
:-)
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Tue
11.02.03
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Although nominally a 30 day demo, in fact if you have an existing Plandesign licence it seems to install as the full version - although I don't know if that is meant to happen :-)
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Fri
06.02.03
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In Allplan v2003 there is a button to launch Curamess - but Curamess is not bundled with Allplan v 2003 - you must buy it separately(see website).
A demo CD is available at a small charge via the website or the demo can be downloaded from there or from the Nemetschek.com website.
Maxmess - a demo CD of Maxmess also came with the Curamess CD and this also looks very interesting. There is not an English version yet that I can see but it is still worth a look at the website.
Maxmess (nothing to do with being untidy, Messen=to measure in German :-) seems to work with a laptop, Disto laser measure or totalstation and camera to survey existing buildings or objects in 3D. Not quite sure how it works at the moment but surveying small existing buildings and entering the data into Allplan is still mostly a paper and pencil affair and very slow. Anything that helped speed up the surveying would be most welcome.
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Mon
03.02.03
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A quick look through the 'step by step' guides produced by CAD Ltd themselves has answered one puzzle - how to make corner window smart symbols fit within cavity returns instead of aligning to the width plus the facing thickness.
The answer apparently is to make the 'Outer Reveal' setting less than the thickness of the outer layer of the wall - so 99 mm for a 100 mm thick outer leaf of the wall. I must try that with cavity returns in regular openings.
Of the official Nemetschek guides I had not seen the 'Data management' one before which looks very good for information on Layers and Import/Export - but also included are all the essential (v16) guides on 3D modelling, Roof modelling, Presentation, Architecture and Allgeo (the digital terrain modeller).
The supplied 3D symbols of doors and windows and other bits and pieces look very useful and the many textures included are also genuinely usable - cloth, wallpaper, grass, bricks, timber etc.
A pat on the back for all at CAD Ltd !
:-)
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Sun
26.01.03
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Allplan 17 slow startup - the website of Herr Schneider is well worth a browse as there is a lot of information on Allplan - including an answer (Hurrah!) as to why Allplan v17 takes longer and longer to start up the more you use it.
It seems to involve files in the \nem\Allplan\USR\local folder named 'animatio.*'
Close Allplan if running and rename these files using Windows Explorer and see what happens. In my case it reduced the time spent looking at the splash screen from 60 seconds to just a few seconds.
However... I also lost all my general surface properties settings and something happened to the lighting as well. Easily fixed - it helps if you save the surface settings using the file save icon in the lower left of the current project surface properties dialogue - and Allplan recreates the animatio.fil file.
If in doubt restore the original animatio.* files.
I had a look at the contents of the old and new animatio.fil files in the hex editor Ultraedit32 and it seems to be a list of the surface files and their linked texture files. The list seems to grow every time you load another surface file. Perhaps the time spent at startup is to reduce the time for the animation window to set up when accessed later?
It's an explanation anyway .... although the file will grow again and Allplan startup slows again quite quickly.
Allplan 2003 - the 'What's new in Allplan 2003' document is on the CAD Ltd bonus pack CD (see below) and looks very interesting and promising.
It will be a few months I think before the International version is released but our German colleagues are doing a nice job of debugging the first local release and so I guess we should be grateful.
Who debugs the international version is an interesting question - you do tend to feel that there are some things that are not as thoroughly tested because they are less used in the home market - specifically, things like cavity wall returns - which are almost excellent in v17 but need a few bugs fixing to make them usable.
ELSA - I notice that ELSA have reappeared and while their graphics boards now seem to be Ati based at least you can again download drivers for the older Nvidia based cards such as the Gloria, Synergy etc. :-)
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Sat
25.01.03
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The lack of a 'step by step' guide to Plandesign is quite baffling - but then all Nemetschek's manual writing has been in decline for a while (hence see below) although Maxon's Cinema 4D documentation gets better and better.
Oh well, there are more important things to worry about I guess.
Like working over the weekend (as usual) to try to keep on top of all the projects I seem to be running at the moment.
:-)
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Thur
23.01.03
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They are providing purchasers of Allplan with a bonus CD containing many 3D symbols (including doors and window I am told) in a dvd case with the programme CD. The bonus CD also contains all the English translations of currently available Nemetschek 'Step by Step' guides in pdf format together with guides prepared by CAD Ltd and (as if that was not enough) the CD also contains 200 textures of common materials as well as promotional and instructive video and Powerpoint presentations.
Further guides will be added in the same format as they become available.
Perhaps best of all, they are mailing this package out to all existing UK users as well. :-)
Distribution should start next week they say.
Units Converter - a generous Allplan user has posted to the webboard a utility he has written to convert all units of length quickly and easily between Imperial and Metric - look under 'Tips and Tricks' forum.
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Sun
19.01.03
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I have been trying out the demo for the past few weeks and it looks very promising. Basically Curamess allows you to use a digital image to scale elevations and have them brought into Allplan corrected for perspective and thus in true 2D elevation.
There are other uses it can be put to but this would be the most useful to me.
Well worth the download and tryout.
It repays a bit of care in taking the image - 1600 x 1200 minimum and from a distance with a 3 X zoom to reduce curvature from the lens definitely helps.
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Wed
15.01.03
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If you have not heard of bhodinut they produced the SLA shaders now provided with Cinema 4D as well as other plug-ins for C4D.
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Jan
09.01.03
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There seem to be some events at HQ during 13-17 January... if you happen to be in Munich.
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Jan
07.01.03
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Update 09.01.03 - In a related item, I see they have now also posted my article from last year, 'The small practice architect's tale' to the cadserver site - the images have been downsampled unfortunately (but this probably improves the picture of me! :-)
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Jan
06.01.03
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January is one of the busiest times of the year for building work here because there are few tourists at this time... this year is no exception!
:-)
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