topic Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad in Modeling

Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:15:22 GMT

Hi,

Has anyone got any idea how you'd meet this kind of criteria for a town masterplan?

We need to design a city for around five thousand people. Now in Revit or AutoCAD architecture, you may try and do it with intelligent masses or spaces. In Modelur, you'd just do it but get stuck on the 2D print offs.

In practice, the computer model landscape will be littered with objects that sit in urban zones. These objects need to be able to return values for Gross Floor Area, Volume, Building Factor, Plot Ratio, Number of floors etc.

The zones that the building objects sit in need to return values for Total Gross Floor Area by Building Type, Average Height, Zone Total Area, Built Area on Zone etc etc.

I think you guys get my drift. Its buildings and zones - and they need to be able to return lots on numbers automatically.

Is this possible in ArchiCAD? The main killer in Revit is in creating floor levels for each mass at different heights and attaching these building objects to a zone in the city in a meaningful way. I've found postings here that seem to suggest there are similar problems in ArchiCAD.

Any suggestions or help would be hugely helpful!

Thanks in advance.

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Nando Mogollon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:03:18 GMT

Hi Dave,

I think there's no big issue, this is what I would do:
- The landscape would be a mix of Meshes and Slabs.
- For Urban Zones, you can Use Zones on a particular category
- For individual Buildings you can have Zones, with additional Parameters (# of stories, or building type) added to the Stamp, so you can "extract" that information in a schedule/list.

You can also create an Object for the buildings with GDL, but then it gets more complicated.

does it helps?

Nando M

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Aaron Bourgoin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:03:51 GMT

City Engine?
http://www.procedural.com/

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Ingolf — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:00:13 GMT

SketchUp and ArchiCAD work well together when forming an urban landscape. A former BIM student of mine, Torgeir Rønsen (from the Firm BIM Concept http://www.bimconcept.no/), made this City Plan when making a model of the Vestbanen Project of Statsbygg in Oslo, Norway.

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Aaron Bourgoin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:02:10 GMT

ArchiCAD is in use here in Canada bu Urban Strategies: http://www.urbanstrategies.com/

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Ingolf — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:03:45 GMT

...and the attachment follows... (sorry for the Norwegian text)

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Ingolf — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:08:30 GMT

ArchiCAD has detailed and powerfull possibilities to model an urban landscape even further. This plan was concieved in a single week... (From Torgeir Rønsen, http://www.bimconcept.no/)

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:40:40 GMT

Aaron wrote:
City Engine?
http://www.procedural.com/

WOW !

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:23:00 GMT

NandoMogollon wrote:
You can also create an Object for the buildings with GDL, but then it gets more complicated.

Thanks all for the great replies.

The accuracy is absolutely critical. We can fudge a urban landscape using Revit Conceptual massing tools, but what we need is for the urban landscape objects to be intelligent.

We need to pull alot of numbers, ie 5000 homes, plus schools, offices etc off the plans. Each home, office etc, needs to report a Gross Floor Area, a Plot Ratio, Urban Zone name and so on.

This all needs to be done fast. So when you place an office, you can just grab the top of it in CAD, drag it up to make it taller, pull the side to make it fatter and bingo, all the numbers appear in the schedule automatically (floor area, number of floors, height, zoning)...,place an automatic tag on it, then on to the the next building.

Incredibly, only the free Sketcup plugin called Modelur http://www.modelur.com/ comes close, but it doesn't allow multiple urban zones, and it doesn't have a 2D printing ability (ie no tags for buildings and zones)

I noticed that there were issues with storey settings in a multiple building landscape as reported here which sounds very similar to Revit, afterall these are programs for designing a building, not cities. The other limitation, out of interest in Revit, is there is a 5000ft limit to the width of the model.

We don't really mind, maybe, on getting involved in GDL if it solves the problem - but then equally, we could go down the VBA route in Autocad.

I couldn't get the http://www.bimconcept.no/ link to work but I may be able to hunt down some posting by Urbanstrategies on forums somewhere to find out how they built their city models in ArchiCAD and if they were blocks or intelligent blocks they used.

Any more thoughts would be hugely welcome!

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Ingolf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:57:58 GMT

Hello Helsinki_Dave!

My former students work to form the Firm BIM Concept, and their Web Site isn't up and go yet. I harrass them the best I can so the Web Site becomes public...

Another firm made by former students is BIM Consult...
www.bimconsult.no (The text is in Norwegian...)

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Erika Epstein — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:03:55 GMT

You can do this in the Onuma Planning System OPS

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Ingolf — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:19:10 GMT

The last issue of the Nordic magazine ArchiMAG, has an article about The Viborg Project (ArchiMAG 1-2009 page 3,4) Viborg was a Finnish city overtaken by the Russians after WW2. A 3D modelling project using ArchiCAD is near completion (or is completed). The aim of this project is to model Viborg the way it was before the war, thus making a virtual city.
The Finnish ArchiCAD office can be asked about this:
http://www.mad.fi/mad/englishmad.html
Sorry I didn't find any direct addresses to the Viborg Project.

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:52:51 GMT

Ingolf wrote:
Viborg Project.

http://www.virtuaaliviipuri.tamk.fi/index.php?lang=en

Thanks for the link - that's a quite amazing story of the evacuation of that city. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole place turns up as a layer in Google Earth sometime soon - although ironically, I'm told that the place hasn't really changed since the 50's, much to the distaste of the Finns who can't understand why Russia took their second largest city and did very little with it in the years that followed.

I'll get MAD (Archicad resellers) in to have a look at this urban design problem and pitch the software, and I've sent an email to OPS, thanks for the link.

We're getting software in to test from CityZoom as well, which is dedicated urban design stuff still in Beta stage- but the problem there is that once we have it, we can't use if for architecture - like we could with Archicad.

Nice community here, taa muchly!

Re: Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

Mats_Knutsson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:58:24 GMT

Helsinki_Dave wrote:
Ingolf wrote:
Viborg Project.
http://www.virtuaaliviipuri.tamk.fi/index.php?lang=en

Thanks for the link - that's a quite amazing story of the evacuation of that city. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole place turns up as a layer in Google Earth sometime soon - although ironically, I'm told that the place hasn't really changed since the 50's, much to the distaste of the Finns who can't understand why Russia took their second largest city and did very little with it in the years that followed.

I'll get MAD (Archicad resellers) in to have a look at this urban design problem and pitch the software, and I've sent an email to OPS, thanks for the link.

We're getting software in to test from CityZoom as well, which is dedicated urban design stuff still in Beta stage- but the problem there is that once we have it, we can't use if for architecture - like we could with Archicad.

Nice community here, taa muchly!

www.cej.fi does exactly what you are looking for and more. The have gone beoynd ArchiCADs already easy way of doing large city plans. They have tweaked the zone tool slightly.
Cheers.