topic Re: Massing In ArchiCad? in Modeling

Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Tue, 23 May 2023 13:42:53 GMT

Hi,
I was wandering what are the TOOLS & PROCESS others use to do the massing of buildings, which in turn would be used as a base for creating walls, slabs and roofs.
This is the process I go through:
1. Creating the rectangular floor slabs at each story.
2. Create a Slab enveloping the floor slabs with thickness of slab as story height at each level.
3. Cutting up the building with the SEO.
4. Tracing the slab in step 2 with the wall, object (for curtain walls) and roof tools.
Any thoughts and feed back?
Thanks,
Joseph Harouni

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 18:17:04 GMT

It sounds like you have a pretty good process. What do you mean by "enveloping" slabs. In preliminary (massing) studies I usually just make the slabs the floor to floor height to start and change them to the correct values when I am ready to add walls. I often use the mesh tool to place the surrounding buildings as simple grey forms. The roof faces can be a bit fussy, but the simple clay model look has a nice effect.

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 18:39:05 GMT

Matthew wrote:
What do you mean by "enveloping" slabs.

My actual slabs at each floor is the foot print and inside this other enveloping slab, which extends from floor to floor. The outer surfaces of this enveloping slab represents the exterior skin of the building. Which following Carving out these enveloping elements in 3D I can trace them for creating actual walls, Objects and roofs at each floor.
Any other better process?
Joseph

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 20:05:12 GMT

I recommend against the overlapping slabs (if I understand you correctly). They won't clean up or section correctly. I suppose this can be managed by layers. I keep the massing models as simple as possible since I typically abandon them once schematic design starts and walls are put in.

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 20:17:53 GMT

Matthew wrote:
I recommend against the overlapping slabs.

How about using Mesh tool as the enveloping element for massing purposes?
Thanks,
Joseph

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 20:29:08 GMT

The mesh is also a reasonable approach. I generally only use it for the context buildings (simple grey boxes) as I said. I assume that what you want is to continue to maintain the massing model through schematic design (and perhaps beyond?).

Since I have always abandoned the massing study once the design model starts, I don't have any real experience with what works best in this case. You'll just have to see what works best for you.

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 20:41:01 GMT

Sketchup? amazing, download the demo

there's a sketchup to AC plugin. haven't used it so can't say how well it works but maybe someone else could chime in here

bill

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 21:13:32 GMT

Matthew wrote:
I assume that what you want is to continue to maintain the massing model through schematic design (and perhaps beyond?).

Good catch Matthew, "schematic design (and perhaps beyond". As the next post mentioned SketchUp is a good way; I have it and love it But I was at Eureka seminar presentation. They actually created a massing of building and saved it as a modeling plan then worked on the current file, adding elements and detailing it. When a new design idea came to them, they went back to the massing model make the changes and copy paste the changes to the main plan. As the result the design could change with out going back and forth between different programs (SketchUp) and detailed plans would stay intact and up to date.
Thanks,
Joseph

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Mon, 10 May 2004 21:22:55 GMT

Joseph,

Perhaps you should keep the massing model separate as you describe and hotlink it into the design model. The details will depend on the specifics of your practice and the project. Pretty soon you may be the expert on this subject around here.

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Tue, 11 May 2004 17:50:17 GMT

Hello,
Does anyone know where to get the Sketchup to Archicad plugin?
I did not find it in the Schetchup site.

Thanks,
Peter Devlin

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

aahatimo — Tue, 11 May 2004 23:46:34 GMT

peter try this link. i think you fill out the bottom of the page.
http://sketchup.com/plugins/
let us know how it works!

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 May 2004 00:05:14 GMT

Tim,
Thank you for your reply.
I went back to the Sketchup site and found it.
I downloaded what I thought was the installer but
it's icon and "get info" indicated it to be a text file.
Double clicking on it opens a text file filled with meaningless characters.
Tomorrow I am going to call Sketchup and find out what I did wrong.
Thanks,
Peter Devlin

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Djordje — Wed, 12 May 2004 06:30:28 GMT

Peter wrote:
I went back to the Sketchup site and found it.
I downloaded what I thought was the installer but
it's icon and "get info" indicated it to be a text file.
Double clicking on it opens a text file filled with meaningless characters.
Tomorrow I am going to call Sketchup and find out what I did wrong.

The URL is http://sketchup.com/plugins/

Are you sure that you downloaded both the plugin AND the readme and that you are not trying to install the plugin by double clicking on Readme? Sounds stupid, but I did worse 😉

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 May 2004 19:41:57 GMT

Djordje,
I downloaded both the readme and what I thought was the installer.
The readme opens fine. It is the other file that is strange.
Thanks,
Peter

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 May 2004 20:27:40 GMT

Hello,
I called Sketchup and they told me the following:
Very often for an unknown reason the file does not download correctly.
The file has to be renamed as skp2ac8.1.dmg.gz to be the correct file type.
Sketchup is unhappy with this plug-in and is having it rewritten from scratch.
They suggest that AC users should not use the present plug-in but
wait for the rewritten version.
That's what I found out.
Peter Devlin

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 May 2004 20:42:56 GMT

mac/pc?

os?

file extension of downloaded/expanded file?

(on mac i think you need minimum AC 8.1 / OS 10.3, or possibly 10.2)

bill

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Wed, 12 May 2004 20:49:03 GMT

peter

you're post slightly pre-empted me

nice to know that @lastsoftware are listening

bill

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Fri, 14 May 2004 06:36:29 GMT

The straight dope-technically speaking:

the tgz file is just a compressed archive replacing the .sit, .sea .cpt .hqx on the mac osx, and .zip, .rar on the windows. It should decompress into an installer package (.mpkg), which in turn -when doubleclicked-starts the Mac OSX STANDARD Installer, and an interactive installation begins. Unlike the Sketchup installer, the skp2AC8 is NOT a disk image, from where you just drag the application package to your Application folder, but it is indeed a folder containing the installer package. It had to be compressed into a binary .tgz archive, in order to be downloadable from the web.

IF the tgz file is not expanding into the folder containing the package, then (as suggested to Peter in the direct e-mail earlier) he should go ahead and install Stuffit Standard (currently) 8.02 package, which will take care all the expanding and compressing needs.

As far as I can tell Peter' computer didn't pass the decompression step.

I'm surpized what @Last supposedly had to say about the plug-in, which is also localized into German and French lately. It is a bit demoralizing, especially when the problem which prompted the asking for expert opinion is with the decompression.

Once you get it working it works fine, however the installer itself is somewhat choosy, for the best results, the ArchiCAD installation should be conducted with sticking with the default location, and stay with the root volume (first disk, where the system is installed).

If you've kept reading so far down the message, you deserve some more technical details:)

-the installer is not really shining when one has to install 3 components: two into fixed locations (skptoxml tool into the /Library folder, SketchUpReader.Frameworks into the /Library/Frameworks folder), and one into a location where ArchiCAD happened to be installed (Into the Add-Ons folder, by default it goes into the Add-Ons/Import-Export folder whithin the ArchiCAD folder)
The installer is indeed under revision to make it more flexible when something is not at the default place, it has the capacity to execute after install scripts, but it was flaky and unreliable under 10.2

-so why is it 3 parts and not just the add-on? Because the sketchupreader is implemented as a mach-O framework (COM DLL on the windows side), and the ArchiCAD add-on is a CFM linked shared library. CFM and mach-O don't mix very well, so the plug-in has to execute a shell command to create and intermediate (XML) file, which is then read in by the plug-in and the ArchiCAD elements created.

But all these details only have entertainment value until the installer package is successfully uncompressed and the MacOSX Installer does its thing.

Maybe some local mac osX expert can be the cavalry- at least until firing up the installer and verifying that the components are in the right places.

Best Regards,
Ferenc

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Fri, 14 May 2004 06:46:56 GMT

OOPS,

Sorry about the accusation, I did NOT have an e-mail conversation about this with Peter. I checked my correspondence and it was with an other person (from down under).

Apologies.

The technical details are still valid.

Re: Massing In ArchiCad?

Anonymous — Fri, 14 May 2004 18:46:32 GMT

Hello Ferenc,
I have StuffIt Standard 7.0.1 installed of my machine.
Are you saying it is unable to decompress the sketchup file?
Tech support at Sketchup did not mention anything
concerning one decompression utility vs another, or different versions.
Thanks,
Peter
P.S. I miss the Pianos frozen in time and the sailboats with spinnakers.
I always got a kick out of that.