ArchiCAD Geek

This post is a follow up to "ArchiCAD Modeling Using CAD plans - Importing DWG files" Read post here. For this second part, I will consider importing DWG plans with the Place External Drawing tool. Managing imported CAD plans: After importing our CAD plans, I take a few minutes to think about how I will organize the imported plans. Ideally, I put a plan or a view per worksheet, so that my imported plans tree looks really organized and it will help me when changing the plan I am modeling on. Basically my worksheets will look like this. Unfortunately, unless you have a CAD file for every plan or view (which is impractical for the CAD users), you will have to explode your exported drawings and then copy and paste every plan in its respective worksheet. And as we have seen in the first part or this post, after exploding drawing we lose the ability to update then one a modification is made to the CAD file. Unless you are certain that the CAD files won’t change, like the case of a...

Modeling using CAD plans is a frequent situation, whether making as-built models or modeling on the basis of the team's CAD plans in a project. The first thing to do is to import the CAD aplans into the project, it’s a simple task but as ArchiCAD is giving us some options of how to do that, there’s a few things to say. There’s three option of how to import a CAD drawing into the current project: Merge a DWG file Attach an Xref (External Reference) Place an external drawing. To choose from these options, it’s important to know how each one works. Merge a DWG file (or DXF): To merge DXF or DWG format files into the current ARCHICAD Project, use: File > Interoperability > Merge form file (or form BIMcloud). After choosing the file, in the Merge DXF-DWG dialog box, you have the option of merging the content of Model Space (in AutoCAD) into the current View, or to Merge (Append) Paper Spaces tothe Layout Book of the Project. In the Merge content of Model Space into current View...