sketchup importer for ac9 coming soon?

[aahatimo]

fresh from sketchup's newsletter it looks like they will be demonstrating both su 5 & a sketchup importer for ac9 at the aia convention in vegas.

from may newsletter:
'....We're previewing SU5 at the House of Blues Music Hall on Thursday (May 19) evening.

Thanks to our great development teams, there is a new ArchiCAD 9 plug in. Our own Kevin Durham will be demonstrating in the Graphisoft booth (#4020) at scheduled times each day.

We're also really excited about co-hosting a bash with Apple on Friday night in the Islander Room (G-H), on the lower level of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The Apple Architecture by Design gathering will give you Mac users (and future Mac users) the chance to see the how well SketchUp and a few other tools work for architectural design on the Apple platform. Register at:
www.seminars.apple.com/go/architecture05 '

[Karl Ottenstein]

Hi Brad,

Beijing now, eh?!

I have not heard anything that can be said in public. I'm sure when GS has the plug-in ready, it will be announced on www.graphisoft.com as well as here. 😉

I just tried your approach - AC model into SU - last week with a friend and found it really effective. We had some complex stepped footings that were modeled in AC, but without the sloping parts of the steps - which made the footing model look pretty bad. Rather than the hassle of roofs/etc in AC, it was so easy to create the footing steps in SU. The result can come back into AC as 3DS.

SU seems to get a little sluggish with too big of a model (too many polygons) though. And, as beautiful as the dynamic shadows are, turning them on kills the fluidity of interaction. I'm sure they're working on that.

Another way cool thing about SU that you've probably used is the 3D annotation that dynamically rotates to face the camera as the viewpoint changes. So, we can take marqueed pieces of an AC model into SU and produce pretty nice looking annotated isometric details from more than one viewpoint. As you say, the result can be brought back into AC. Unfortunately, the entire process is not with live model data. I continue to wait for an AC version that supports live 3D views that can be annotated and linked to PM...

I agree with your comments in your PS. (The Maxon add-on has been renamed MaxonForm though.)

Karl

[stefan]

I use SketchUp all the time, but am not really exchanging the model with ArchiCAD that much. It has it's uses, but I see it more in the line of Maxonform: making a nice SketchUp model and importing it as a library element in my ArchiCAD scene.

But I usually go the other way around: exporting from ArchiCAD. I don't need all that 3D detail slowing down my sections... I prefer clean 2D elements for that.

[Anonymous]

Here's a slightly off-topic question, but it pertains to the MaxonForm and SU threads: when reimporting 3DS into Archicad, how do you avoid the triangulation lines along faces/facets? I know that if you render, these disappear, but in plan/3d/section elevation, they seem to be a permanent, and ugly, feature of any model brought back into Archicad, be it from SU, C4D, Maya, Cheetah, etc...


Karl: yes, Beijing. The quality of life and quality of the air was just too high where I used to live, so I thought I'd move to China to make everything a little nastier 😉

[stefan]

Brad wrote:
Here's a slightly off-topic question, but it pertains to the MaxonForm and SU threads: when reimporting 3DS into Archicad, how do you avoid the triangulation lines along faces/facets? I know that if you render, these disappear, but in plan/3d/section elevation, they seem to be a permanent, and ugly, feature of any model brought back into Archicad, be it from SU, C4D, Maya, Cheetah, etc...

I guess you can't.

In older days, I imported OBJ files into ArchiCAD and that respected the smoothing of a form. Smoothed edges were not shown in S/E. It was a NURBS model made in VIZ. I guess this depended highly on the implementation of the import-plugin and (in case you don't know) the OBJ-importer was scrapped from ArchiCAD a few versions back...

E.g. http://www2.asro.kuleuven.ac.be/asro/English/HOME/SBs/tutorial/tips/viz2ac.htm

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Brad wrote:
Here's a slightly off-topic question, but it pertains to the MaxonForm and SU threads: when reimporting 3DS into Archicad, how do you avoid the triangulation lines along faces/facets? I know that if you render, these disappear, but in plan/3d/section elevation, they seem to be a permanent, and ugly, feature of any model brought back into Archicad, be it from SU, C4D, Maya, Cheetah, etc...

.......

.


I haven't had this problem. Are you sure that you check the "force smooth" option in the 3ds import dialog box, when you are importing? In my experience, in plan the imported element is displayed as a basic outline(s) of the projected contours of the object from above without triangulation or meshes appearing. Ditto for section and elevation views.

I have to admit though, that in some cases where I imported objects with peculiar curves (creases, folds etc) such as 3DS Max furniture, the 3ds importer seems to approximate those special curves and the object shows up as having jagged lines instead.

My guess would be that is might have something to do with the originating program that produces the 3ds file, and whether it has smoothing there as well. Actually, now that I come to think of it, I remember when I would import objects from Sketchup in particular, I would get triangulation meshes displayed; and sketchup 3ds export ( for v4 anyway) has no smoothing option. My suggestion would be to try to pass the object through a different program which has smoothing option (Max, Rhino and FormZ come to mind) and resave it as a 3ds files again, that might work.

[stefan]

You might try again with SketchUp 5, since it has 3ds import & export now.

[Djordje]

Karl wrote:
Another way cool thing about SU that you've probably used is the 3D annotation that dynamically rotates to face the camera as the viewpoint changes. So, we can take marqueed pieces of an AC model into SU and produce pretty nice looking annotated isometric details from more than one viewpoint. As you say, the result can be brought back into AC. Unfortunately, the entire process is not with live model data. I continue to wait for an AC version that supports live 3D views that can be annotated and linked to PM...

This is an excellent wishlist item, Karl. Will you do the honours?

Karl wrote:
I agree with your comments in your PS. (The Maxon add-on has been renamed MaxonForm though.)

Me two ... the emphasis is still on MODELING, not DOCUMENTATION that IMHO the strength of ArchiCAD lies in. How VB is all that?

No, I do not want to use BIM! Startups always peed me off ...