Rhino-Archicad issues

[Anonymous]

Hi group,

I have been playing with the Rhino to Archicad export plugin to bring a parametric definition of a stair created in Grasshopper to AC.
The geometry exports fine and quite clean but I'm running into an - I think - important issue.
It seems that the plugin always uses the global coordinate system 000 in Rhino as the objects insertion point or I haven't found a way to change that.

I have (1) modeled a couple of slabs, (2) exported them to Rhino, (3) in Rhino I inserted the GH definition of the stair in the desired position and then (4) exported back the stair definition as a gsm object AC.

I have tried changing the CPlane origin in Rhino to the desired position and re-exporting but the object still comes with the Global 000.

This makes it difficult to roundtrip, which is quite an interesting thing to do... I know I can move the stair to the 0,0 and export, but that is not optimal, we should be able to assign the proper 0,0 to the object somehow... or may be I'm missing something here.

See attached images for reference.

Regards

[Eduardo Rolon]

My old workaround (for 3DS and OBJ) has been to place a small "dummy" object at the 0,0,0 point to use as a reference and always export both of them. You could make it a 2D Plane so that it does not show in Elevs/Sections and you could either assign a White Pen for the Reference Plane (so you can see it and it won't print) or edit the 2D GSM and erase it.

[Anonymous]

ejrolon wrote:
My old workaround (for 3DS and OBJ) has been to place a small "dummy" object at the 0,0,0 point to use as a reference and always export both of them. You could make it a 2D Plane so that it does not show in Elevs/Sections and you could either assign a White Pen for the Reference Plane (so you can see it and it won't print) or edit the 2D GSM and erase it.

Yes, I guess that's a valid workaround. Nonetheless I think it limits the use in complex models where the 0,0 might be far away from the object.

Also, how do you handle modifications?

When I reload the object to the Archicad embeded library it does not update the geometry. I have to change the object to a dummy object, delete the old definition, re-import the new one and assign it to the object. Is this normal, can't one just reload the .gsm part to the library and update the instances in the model?

Regards

[Eduardo Rolon]

* Since you should not model too far away from 0,0,0 that should not be an issue.
• I have not tried the converter but previously what I used to do was overwriting the object in the particular linked library for the project. This means that I did not embed the object into AC. With this option you just reload the library and all objects should update accordingly.
• I think that with embedded objects you need to match the name of the original one so that it is overwritten.

[Anonymous]

That's what I found playing with that Rhino-Archicad plugin:

- The imported object doesn't update even it is in a linked library (not embedded).

- The easiest way to get rid of that 'center point' is to open library object and manually delete "hotspot 0,0,0" in 2d and 3d script. Though it will be there again if the library part is updated.

- Importing as lcf seems to be a better solution as it doesn't have a 'center point' problem and it can be updated via Rhino LCF Observer. The only big problem is that AC doesn't allow a linked lcf to be changed while running. And it is very frustrating and time consuming having to close AC every time you need to export Rhino geometry. It just ruins the whole concept.

Also it feels that imported gsm objects for some reason perform slower than the same objects converted from 3ds.

[Anonymous]

archimax wrote:

- Importing as lcf seems to be a better solution as it doesn't have a 'center point' problem and it can be updated via Rhino LCF Observer. The only big problem is that AC doesn't allow a linked lcf to be changed while running. And it is very frustrating and time consuming having to close AC every time you need to export Rhino geometry. It just ruins the whole concept.

Yes, I have tried it and the workaround is delete the lcf library in the library manager, resave in Rhino, load again lcf, update with lcf observer. This can be done without restarting Archicad but it is time consuming.

I guess Archicad locks the lcf file when you link it, which shouldn't happen.