Well, the import plug-in has it's limitations, and yes, most of it is by design.
1., it was intended to make the transition from SketchUp to ArchiCAD when you are going from conceptual to design development phase. As you develop the model further in SketchUp (giving walls thickness, etc.), the translation gets less effective in translating those refinements.
2., we've tried to keep it simple. the idea was that if something is easy to do in ArchiCAD after the transition (select all walls on a layer than specify their thickness, composite structure, etc in one step), then it should be done that way rather then making up a complex set of translation rules and entering via a new and convoluted user interface
3., make as little of the adjustments necessary in SketchUp as possible. To operate with maximum efficiency the only thing you can -and should do- in SketchUp is:
A.: put the elements you do NOT want to translate into walls/roofs/slabs onto a separate layers from the faces you DO want to translate into walls/roofs/slabs
B.: Group -or create components from- faces you want to translate into library parts.
C.: Use the paintbucket! Paint every surface where the color counts in your model, and its color will be translated into the color of the material with the same name in ArchiCAD. Simple colours will translate into "Generic" material in ArchiCAD and the surface color is picked up from the pencolor.
I was (and am still) open to suggestions to make the plugin more useful without deviating too much from the above principles, and in a future code revision we will squeeze in those.
With that said there are a couple of quirks coming from technical difficulties and the differences in the SketchUp and ArchiCAD modeling conventions.
1., Merge function is not implemented, but it is not disabled in the Merge dialog. This is a bug, and it will be corrected in the next revision (it is already corrected in the French and German versions).
2., The origin of a component in SketchUp is -usually- in the lower left corner. For wall openings, this has to be translated to the lower middle point of a windor/door in ArchiCAD, so the insertion point is moved by a/2, and the library part coordinates are translated by -a/2.
This works for the standard component library elements, but one can create components disregarding this convention, and will be a little "off"- the selection points will be "off" from the windowframe (see the octagonal window in the house05.skp example file). It could be fixed by computing the bounding box in the lib part and create custom adjustments by library part type. This hopefully won't create more problems when "fixed".
3., MAC OSX ONLY: because of the framework/tool/plugin cooperation details it looks like the installation and the plugin works only when everything (/Library folder, the ArchiCAD folder, and the documents to be translated) are on the ROOT volume. So stick to the standard installations to save trouble. (I haven't yet solved this problem, and maybe never will unless there is a very compelling reason to do so, OR it will be simpler than it looks)
So these are the current known SPECIFIC problems and limitations.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome (as always).
Let's keep the lights on!
Best Regards,
Ferenc Lazar
Piano Frozen in Time
