• 3D navigation

"Real navigation" in ArchiCAD 10

Phenomenon: Starting with ArchiCAD version 10, the camera moves during zoom and fit-in-window operations. In ArchiCAD 9 and earlier, zooming did not change the camera position

In ArchiCAD 9, zoom was a “fake” action, because it was basically an image-editing action, like bitmap editing in photo editor – a part of a still image was enlarged. This surfaced most during the “Fit in window” command. It had the following problems:

• when you continued to navigate after fit in window, the view “jumped back” to the state in which it was before the “fit in window”
• when the model was out of the view cone - e.g. model was behind camera - Fit in window was useless, it did not do anything, you could not “find” the model easily

This latter phenomenon was enough reason to change “Fit in window” to work as it does in most other 3D applications: camera turns towards the center of the model, and moves closer or farther as required to fit the model in the window frame. This means that camera moves during zoom. Although this is the standard in the CAD industry, it is true that it is not what zoom means in photography. In photography, zoom means changing the view cone, which is also possible in ArchiCAD. So if you want “real” zoom with a steady camera, change the view cone angle. (In the navigator preview, you can conveniently change view cone with a slider)

Reverting to prior 3D navigation on PC

If you still want to revert to the old (pre-ArchiCAD 10) navigation, you can achieve it by setting a registry key:

In the “Run” command line, type regedit – this will open the Windows registry Find the key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Graphisoft\ArchiCAD\ArchiCAD 10.0.0 INT R1\3DNavigation” and set “RealNavigation” to value=0 by double-clicking the name and modifying the value in the pop-up dialog.

Then zoom and fit-in-window will work as it did in ArchiCAD 9 and earlier.

Reverting to prior navigation on Mac

You need to have an application that is capable of editing preferences (plist) files. If you don't have one, download "Pref Setter": http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/prefsetter.html

1.After installing the application, run it. 2.In the list that appears, find "com.graphisoft.AC 10.0.0 INT v1" (substitute INT with your language version) 3.Double click it. 4.In the appearing window find the row "3DNavigation" 5.Expand this row and find the "RealNavigation" parameter. By double clicking on the value it will change from "true" to "false" 6.Try to close this window and when prompted answer "Save"