Archicad to ETABS (and back)???

[InForma]

Anyone with experience in transferring a model to ETABS?

http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/downloads/AC-ETABS/ was not much help.

I NEEEEED some pointers!

How to prepare the model in Archicad?
Is dxf or IFC the best?
How to set up the options during dxf/IFC file save?

Thanks!

[Roopa A]

Try this. Below is the link.

[Barry Kelly]

Roopa wrote:
Try this. Below is the link.

I hope InForma hasn't been waiting 13 years for your reply.


Barry.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Glad this got bumped (not that I remember reading it back in 2007). I'm looking for an answer to this question. Our structural consultants use ETABS and SAFE.

[Roopa A]

Barry wrote:

Roopa wrote:
Try this. Below is the link.

I hope InForma hasn't been waiting 13 years for your reply.


Barry.

I joined recently.

And I also tried this now. So I posted it.

Its working????

[Djordje]

Let's bump it up again, and keep on bumping.

STAAD and ETABS are used worldwide, and not having a secure and robust connection, even with IFC translator, is not good.

Did anyone tweak the IFC Translator for ETABS? STAAD? Hm?

[Djordje]

Now...

Import from ETABS works nicely, except for the columns with non rectangular shape.

The other way around... not really...

[Carlos Cordeiro]

Dear Djordje,

I assume your end goal is to run a structural analysis in ETABS. Did you try to export from Archicad only the analytical model using IFC-SAV? Please notice that you should check the correspondent feature under the "Experimental Features" dialog box in order to have this file format available.

The interoperability using IFC-SAV is not perfect (is there actually something perfect?) but all the tests I personally did worked out well.

In case this will not satisfy your end goal, there is still hope using SAF file.

Happy to help with this topic.

[Djordje]

Hi Carlos

Thanks for the reply 🙂

We run both STAAD and ETABS in house and would like to establish the workflow. The structural engineers need the model to come in.

We were looking for the particular ETABS related workflow or article, and could not find anything. Tried the plain IFC export and got the walls in.

Could you please share a document outlining the general workflow?

Thanks! 🙂

[Carlos Cordeiro]

Hi @Djordje 

First of all, sorry for this (very) late reply.

First the "bad" news: we do not have a workflow guide for this specific workflow but, (now the good news) I can help you to overcome some issues you may face. There is another option for this workflow and uses SAF instead of IFC, but is totally experimental and unfortunately due to ETABS API limitations, does not fully support all scenarios.

When you mention that only the walls came in to ETABS, you used a "regular" IFC or the IFC-SAV?