Architerra

[Peter Bennison]

What do we think for modelling steeply sloping big house site in conjunction with AC ? Looking for appreciations/comments/comparisons concerning Cigrap Architerra 3.

[Karl Ottenstein]

I always do it with a mesh in ArchiCAD, perhaps because I have not learned to use Architerra yet. No problems, other than the texture mapping issue discussed in a thread this past week (linking to older threads).

Cheers,
Karl

[Peter Bennison]

Hi Karl, and can the AC mesh tool read a dxf or text tab-delineated file from the surveyor ? I'll go looking for the thread that you mentioned.
Thanks, Peter

[Karl Ottenstein]

Peter wrote:
Hi Karl, and can the AC mesh tool read a dxf or text tab-delineated file from the surveyor ? I'll go looking for the thread that you mentioned.

Hi Peter,

No. You need to trace over a dwg/dxf from the surveyor and/or magic wand the contours, etc to add user ridges and manually set the heights... which annoyingly sets the height of all points of the contour except the end points at the edges of the mesh which have to be set manually in a separate step.

If you have tab-delimited x/y/z values, then ArchiTerra is the way to go, as it will create the mesh for you ... and has other nice features as well.

If you have a 3D dxf/dwg, the only way to bring that into ArchiCAD is as an object - not a mesh. Solid Element Operations do not work with objects (to excavate your building site/etc), the object will likely have no depth, but just be a surface, and doing texture mapping onto it can be challenging.

I did get a dwg from one engineer that I took into SketchUp, projected the desired texture onto it there, exported the texture-mapped result as 3ds and imported the 3ds (via the downloadable Help > Goodies 3ds import add-on) to get a texture-mapped 3D piece of terrain once. But, again, no solid element ops possible, so not really useful for building placement.

Cheers,
Karl

[Thomas Holm]

Karl wrote:
...If you have a 3D dxf/dwg, the only way to bring that into ArchiCAD is as an object - not a mesh. ...

Karl, this may be slightly off topic, but I'd like to know if you have tested and found out how these (attached image) translator settings work. (The Help file is somewhat sparse). I may be wrong, but I've interpreted these as a way to get some 3D content into Archicad without importing as objects. I have not been able to work it out, though. Do you have any more info?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Thomas wrote:
Do you have any more info?

No. I'd be very interested to hear about when/how those options work... probably in a new thread.

Thanks!
Karl

[Thomas Holm]

Karl wrote:
No. I'd be very interested to hear about when/how those options work... probably in a new thread.

Me too. Perhaps some DWG translation guru could be made to post a Wiki entry about these Custom Functions?
The Help file's "these add-ons are part of the DWG translation setup" isn't the most helpful info.

[Erika Epstein]

Karl wrote:
which annoyingly sets the height of all points of the contour except the end points at the edges of the mesh which have to be set manually in a separate step.
Karl

Actually, while occassionally I have this problem, I don't typically have to go back and set the end points as you describe. I just tried to replicate the end contour node problem and I couldn't.
Yet, the other day I was making a site mesh and had to do this for some, not all, of the end nodes.