Parametric design
About Rhino & Grasshopper and PARAM-O.

Mac Rhino 5 Archicad 19

Anonymous
Not applicable
Greetings all. I am versed in most modelling software but fairly new to all things BIM. I have used Revit but am a novice in Archicad (I’ve been using it for just over a month now). This said I already see the benefit to coupling Archicad with other modelling software, more specifically Rhino.

I am attempting to develop a workflow/pipeline where most generic modelling will occur in Archicad, but complex profiles and geometry will be done in Rhino/grasshopper. Archicad 19 has a windows plugin which works wonderful but unfortunately since Mac’s Rhino just came out of beta no such plugin exists.

Mac users, what are your recommendations with regards to creating geometry in Rhino and bringing it into Archicad?

A second question: is there a benefit to developing custom objects, either via the morph tool or custom profiles in Archicad over modelling the objects in other programs? I know sketchup tends to not play well with other 3d programs and when brought into Archicad there is very little embedded information. Would this be the same case with .dxf or .lcs exported from Rhino?

Again as a BIM amateur I am trying to develop a system where I can leverage the advantages of other modelling softwares and embed them into Archicad without losing the properties which make BIM so useful.

Thank you for your time and attention.
4 REPLIES 4
Anonymous
Not applicable
I don't use rhino, but Vws (parasolid) for nurbs and Archicad and I couldn't agree more. In my case to think there isn't a way to translate files, Data & parametrics between nemetschek companies is ludicrous.my2c
Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi Chanceh,

If you can download and install RhinoMac WIP, then IFC is an option with my Geometry Gym plugin. You can import and export IFC. Note that as Archicad doesn't have nurbs (to my knowledge), then shapes that can't be expressed must be meshed (which I believe is what the Graphisoft plugin is doing anyway). I do support IFC4 which has nurbs as an improvement, but I don't know when Graphisoft will support IFC4 and if nurbs would be included in their implementation.

Here's an import image.


You can download from http://www.geoemetrygym.com/downloads and refer to this blog post.
http://geometrygym.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/geometry-gym-mac-plugins.html

The official release of RhinoMac should soon support dotnet plugins.

If you have any questions or suggestions, I look forward to hearing them.

Cheers,

Jon
Anonymous
Not applicable
Jon,

Thank you for the recommendation. This is exactly what I was looking for! Unfortunately my new Mac will not be arriving for a few weeks, but once I am up and running I will definitely be using your plugin.

Thanks again!
stefan
Expert
With the plugins from Graphisoft, you can read 3DM files from Rhino (Mac or Windows) with ArchiCAD (Mac or Windows). It is the Grasshopper connection that is Windows-only, as Grasshopper is not ported to OSX (yet).
Even as a Mac user, you might be interested, as the 3DM plugins for ArchiCAD are included too (Rhino importer and Rhino exporter):

http://www.graphisoft.com/rhino-grasshopper/


The other way (exporting GDL objects from Rhino) is indeed only available on Windows:

http://www.graphisoft.com/downloads/addons/interoperability/rhino.html
--- stefan boeykens --- bim-expert-architect-engineer-musician ---
Archicad27/Revit2023/Rhino8/Unity/Solibri/Zoom
MBP2023:14"M2MAX/Sonoma+Win11
Archicad-user since 1998
my Archicad Book