How to move around in the ARCHICAD 3D window

This ASM Techbase blog is concentrating on the 3D window. Knowing how to move around in the 3D window will speed up the wholes process of your workflow.

YouTube link to the tutorial or scroll to the end of the post.

TO GET STARTED I DID OPEN ONE OF MY ARCHICAD TUTORIALS

Here we got the 2D Floor plan view

Next hit F5 on your keyboard and we are in the 3D window view

The mouse default with F5 is on orbit. So if you now left click/hold and you move your mouse cursor you are orbiting around the model. You can change the orbit origin if needed. All you have to do is select something in your model you like to orbit around or you.

To get out of the orbit option hit O like orbit J and the curser changes to the arrow tool.

Now you can easy select something in your model by click on it. In this example I selected the top left blade.

If you now hit O again to get back into orbit and you start orbiting by click/hold the left mouse button you will notice the origin of the orbit has changed to the selected blade. So the model will orbit around the blade. As you can see in the below image even so I clicked in the middle of the model and moved my mouse cursor to the right. Because the origin is on the selected blade the model moved away from me on the right hand side and the selected blade stays in place.

If you don’t like to orbit this way you can easy move the selected blade into the middle of the 3D window by using the – zoom to selection - option:

And ARCHICAD’s 3D window moves the blade into the middle of the screen. Handy !

OK what’s next? Lets move the model around by panning it. To get into this option you click/hold the scrolling wheel on your mouse down. Now you can pan.

The next movement is to zoom in and out. You can do this with the mouse scroll wheel.

To show all of the 3D model inside the 3D window just do a zoom extend by double click the mouse wheel.

A short yet useful tip.

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