Managing PDFs is a key part of any team project, and Archicad offers several tools to keep your documentation up to date, editable, and ready to share. This article walks through how to update PDF drawings, make them fully editable, and publish clean...
If you’ve ever opened up an Archicad schedule and thought, “How am I supposed to read this?”, you’re definitely not alone. Busy days and complex projects can turn schedules into a mess of numbers and labels pretty quickly. But now, Archicad 29 offers...
Composing clear, professional layouts is key to quality architectural documentation in Archicad. By combining master layouts, AutoText, lines, fills, and images, you can build drawing sheets that are both attractive and consistent. Below is a complet...
Explore how to publish (save) your layouts and documentation from Archicad using Publisher sets, including recommended formats and common options for PDFs, DWG/DXF, and more. Publisher automates consistent output of Views and Layouts into repeatable ...
3D views are often placed on layouts instead of rendered images. You can now adjust the resolution of these 3D views, allowing you to control image quality or the displayed edge sharpness of the 3D model. NOTE: This feature is available starting with...
Through Project Indexes, you can now find unused views and select them directly from a list of your project views. (Roadmap). This simplifies project organization, as you can quickly clean up your projects from unneeded views and rediscover hard-to-f...
Starting with Archicad 29 Section, Elevation, Interior Elevation, Detail, and Worksheet markers can now receive their own Renovation Status, just like all other documentation and construction elements. This makes it possible to control the visibility...
Tired of spending hours manually dimensioning and labeling your drawings? Archicad’s smart automation tools let you create consistent, accurate, and up-to-date documentation with just a few clicks. Here’s how you can boost your productivity and keep ...
Lost in a sea of information? Archicad's Keynotes feature is here to help you organize and centralize your annotations, ensuring clarity and consistency across your project documentation. Here’s how you can use Keynotes to simplify your workflow and ...
Maintaining consistency across multiple views in Archicad doesn't have to be time-consuming. Instead of setting each view individually, you can use the Pickup Parameters tool to effortlessly copy and replicate view settings. Follow this guide to stre...
What is Keynote in a construction drawing? In a construction drawing, the term "Keynote" refers to a notation system used to identify and describe specific project details. It is an efficient way to provide additional information about architectural ...
Welcome to our series of articles from the One Override To Rule Them All challenge! We invited some of the participants of the challenge to elaborate on their entries, share their workflows and tips&tricks. Enjoy and feel free to start a thread in th...
Welcome to our series of articles from the One Override To Rule Them All challenge! We invited some of the participants of the challenge to elaborate on their entries, share their workflows and tips&tricks. Enjoy and feel free to start a thread in th...
Level Dimension text content was hard to customize The Level Dimensions update in Archicad 26 focuses on avoiding repetitive tasks to save time on creating documentation. These new functions requested by our users make using this tool faster and more...
A manually created Custom Drawing Title has its limitations. The best way to create a Drawing Title that is highly customizable is by creating it through GDL coding, but with the instructions in this article you can turn your manual Custom Drawing Ti...
Note: The steps described in this article are still applicable for the latest version. The expected outcome of site plan as per the Singapore standards are achievable only by the workaround given in the article. Site plan shows Plan of the buildings ...
This article aims to provide some insight into our 2D modernization project spanning across multiple Archicad versions. The focus will be on the changes in line rendering and its benefits. As the title implies, the material is recommended for readers...
There are two ways to label stairs in a section: manually (one by one) or automatically. The manual way is to use the Label Tool, find the Stair Riser Step Index and Stair Tread Step Index from the favorites, which are included in the default Archica...
NOTE: the available Pen Sets and their parameters can be different in every language version. In this case, this PEN SET theory doesn't apply to the U.S. version The Pens and Colors Settings Dialog is available in Options > Element Attributes > Pens ...
Autotext on Master Layouts is an intelligent Archicad tool that automatically updates documentation-related information in title blocks. However, users needed to add manual text, place specific autotexts for each subset in the Layout Book, or create ...
Got a huge amount of folders in your View Map and/or in the Layout Book and want to see all their content expanded? Select the folder and use: ALT+right arrow (MAC) and * (Windows) to expand all within the selected folder ALT+left arrow (MAC) and – (...
With the improved Graphic Overrides now RGB colors can be selected for Background Fill Pens and 3D surfaces in Graphic Override rules. This way, you do not have to create separate pens and surfaces with a specific color to highlight elements if you w...
User interactions should behave consistently and with expected results The behavior of the radial stretch command for curved elements, for versions previous to Archciad 26, could be more consistent. It left a gap in the user’s workflow when working w...
Find and add a rule to a combination When creating Graphic Override Combinations, it can be time-consuming to find and add only one rule at a time to a combination. Now you can perform tasks faster — Graphic Override Combinations let you add multiple...
Import multiple PDF pages at once Importing external content in Archicad is handy for placing external information such as PDF documents in Viewpoints or on Layouts. Until Archicad 26, it was only possible to import one PDF page from the same selecte...
In this article we want to provide some tips and tricks to supplement or enhance architectural drawings. Architects need enhanced architectural drawings to be able to represent their design concept efficiently. Of course, you have to start with a pro...
Note: This article was originally published on AsiaBIM and was written for Archicad 19 mainly for architects working on the Singaporean market. Setting up the Project Altitude properly and displaying its values for BIM Submission in Singapore require...
About the Renovation Feature Element-level Definition of Renovation Status No need to create extra layers: just set a default Renovation Status (Existing, New, To Be Demolished) for all element types. Switch Renovation Status of any/all selected elem...
See also: http://www.cadalyst.com/aec/how-display-elevation-values-relative-sea-level-archicad-insights-tutorial-3714 Level Dimensions Level Dimensions are point-level elevation markers common to architecture and site planning. They measure the eleme...
A quick way of keeping your rendered images up-to-date without re-rendering them manually after changing the model is to use the 3D Only panel of the View Settings. Instead of rendering the specific camera views, then saving and placing the final .jp...
Archicad now allows the user to hotlink multiple blocks with different story settings. Only item that need to be taken care is Level Markings as it do not come from the hotlink file and users have to mark the level with lines and text. The object Sec...
Ever wanted to change how the numbers appear in Archicad, but could not find the settings in the Dimension Preferences? By default all numbers are showing commas for digit grouping and full stops for decimals. This can be very easily changed in the s...
Since there is no perfect solution for labeling an abbreviation (ID or code) of elements, mainly the Surfaces, two main ideas emerged other than using external label objects: use Labels along with Properties or IFC mapping. Though the first may seem ...
Transparency and Vectorial Hatches ( renamed as Surface - Cover Fill Foreground in AC 25) are some nice features of the 3D Documents, so the wish of combining these two for a single surface at some point (for example displaying mesh-like surfaces) is...
There are times when you need a Drone view of the building to show in Master Plan. All you need is the outline of the building, but it takes a lot of time to get a clean and crisp overall boundary of the entire project. And, in case there are updates...
Affected versions: Archicad 25 Update 500x | Severity: fixed in an update | ID: DEF-5748 We have discovered a regression issue with Archicad 25 Update 500x. Issue: After exporting to PDF or other 2D formats, the autotext in a custom drawing title wil...
With the introduction of expressions in ARCHICAD 22 users can extract and manipulate information from the model. Follow the steps below to learn how to take the name of a composite and abbreviate it for use in a partition tag. 1. Go to Options > Comp...
The origin of this tip is a blog post by Pablo Montes on his great blog, Arquitecturama.MX: http://juanpablos.blogspot.com/ There are three options can be set as Range of Element’s Projected Display definition (Show Projection) for a non-straight Wal...
In the AEC industry it is a daily demand to architects to be able to present, display and export their architectural models simplified or filtered in certain ways. Cooperation with structural engineers usually require a structural model. There are se...
Open & Repair is one of the most useful commands in Archicad, it is the solution to many common issues. The purpose of the repair process is to physically fix damaged files. When the damage occurs, one or more parts of the file become corrupted or lo...
See also: How to Insert Autotext in ARCHICAD Help. The ProjectInfo database can be used as a location for stored annotations. These annotations can be then inserted into the project with AutoText. If you work on a plan where the annotations belongs t...
In this article you can find out how to create a simple custom Drawing Title without GDL coding. 1. Draw your custom Drawing Title Navigate to a Floor Plan View Set the scale to 1:1 to get the paper-size portions (because that is how it will be repre...
This is one of those handy tips can save a lot of time to newcomers. Instead of the tedious job of exploding your polyline to fillet with arcs, follow the below steps: select the polyline pick a corner node (not along a section of line) left-click on...
Occasionally you may want to generate a contour map of the terrain of your project. The 3D terrain can be imported from an external source, thus can be an object or a morph in ARCHICAD or can be a mesh created in ARCHICAD. The default Floor Plan repr...
In order to set up the path for only one layout, you have to set the path for the whole set, because the publishing path can be defined only on the level of the sets. To accomplish this there are two ways: The first way: Go to the Publisher Sets in t...
To create a New Fill, you need to open Options/Elements Attributes/Fills panel. There you can edit all the existing Fills and add new ones. By clicking on the New... button you get the choice to create a new Solid fill, a new Symbol, a new Image Fill...
Similar to how font and paragraph styles work we can create and store favorites for Text Styles in ARCHICAD. What are Text Style favorites? First of all, what settings do Text Styles contain? We can customise the following settings: Using these setti...
A BIMx Hyper-model allows users to share a fully developed BIM model with integrated documentation. Please review the steps below detailing how to export and manually upload a file to a 3rd party transfer site. Upload to a 3rd Party Transfer Site 1. ...
Model View Options in ArchiCAD allows users to link the appearance of an element to a specific view without changing the underlying settings of the element. This allows for an element to be represented differently in multiple views. As a result, the ...
Model View Options in ArchiCAD allows users to link the appearance of an element to a specific view without changing the underlying settings of the element. This allows for an element to be represented differently in multiple views. As a result, the ...
Model View Options in ArchiCAD allows users to link the appearance of an element to a specific view without changing the underlying settings of the element. This allows for an element to be represented differently in multiple views. As a result, the ...
Often times a PDF is the only file type available for certain content. Fortunately ArchiCAD allows you to import and convert the vector information into usable elements. Please follow the steps below to import and explode PDFs in ArchiCAD. Importing ...
How do we make a mesh cut line in section dashed? - asked by nickATA on ARCHICAD-TALKOne of our users posted this question on ARCHICAD-TALK about how to make an uncut line of a Mesh dashed on a section. The situation described was with two meshes (on...
Trace image not aligning across Stories - asked by John on ARCHICAD-TALKSometimes we can run into issues with Trace & Reference: the ghost drawing is shifted, not aligning with the content of the stories above certain elements missing from the ghost ...
ARCHICAD allows users to quickly apply hatches and shadows to elevations and sections. To enable shadows and 3D vectorial hatching, please follow the steps below. Navigate to Elevation or Section. Open the Elevation (or Section) Settings dialogue box...
Fills are geometric 2D hatching patterns that help you distinguish and decorate the elements of your project. They can also be used to decorate surfaces in the 3D window and the 3D Documents. ARCHICAD comes with a full set of Fills that are available...
One of the advantages to modeling in 3D is that the project file can be easily exported to a 3D printer using the STL (StereoLithography) file format. Follow the steps below to export the model as an STL. Readying the Model for Export 1. Open the mod...
Is it possible to set two dimensioning methods in ARCHICAD in one project? - asked on FacebookThis question can be interpreted many ways, let's summarise what we know about dimensioning, what we can and can't do. Setting up the units in the project F...
In ARCHICAD we have to handle a lot of data and sometimes it gets complex to analyse and understand all the information embedded in the model. Some of these are non-visual information, such as a parameter or a property related to a construction eleme...
What is an expression? An expression is a mathematical phrase which combines numbers, variables and operators to show the value of something. Being introduced in Archicad 22, expression-based element properties can come in hand when we want to create...
The Angle Dimension tool can be found in the toolbox palette, under the “More” group of tools: Angle Dimensions display angle values: between a pair of lines or linear edges or the angle of a curved element NOTE: Angle dimensions are not available in...
ARCHICAD construction elements on a floor plan usually can have 3 different displays. projection projection with overhead cut only Using Projection with overhead is a similar look for different element types: There are a few exceptions though, having...
In case we would like to show our elements on other stories as well, one might wonder where to set the line type for the display one story above or below? In case of three basic elements, slabs, objects and meshes, we can set this under Project Prefe...
The Grid Tool in ARCHICAD allows elements placed in plan view to show in Elevation and Section. Enabling Grid Elements in Elevation or Section Select the elevation or section in the project map and click the settings button. In the Elevation/Section ...
This article outlines the floor plan representation of staircases using the new Stair Tool. We took a U-Shape stair as an example and followed it through 3 stories. The example in this description is a staircase with a story setting of First Floor 30...
There are many ways to make use of vectorial PDFs in ARCHICAD. Below You can read about are the most commonly used features and tricks. Saving PDFs from ARCHICAD You have two options to save PDF from ARCHICAD: Publish You can also publish PDF documen...
Issue Fills are not printed correctly via the File-Print menu or from printing via the Publisher Dialogue box. Some part of the fills are missing, see examples: Cause When transparent solid fills (also known as "percentage fills") overlay other fills...
Affected version(s): 20 | Severity: workaround applicable | ID: 224455 Issue In certain cases, placed Schedule/Index on Layout appears as solid colour. Cause The issue occurs if Background Pen of the Fill tool is set to RGB colour (Colour of schedule...
Introduction This feature helps the user identify the differences between two views. All the necessary settings are available from the Trace and Reference Palette which is accessible from the Window > Palettes menu. Main options of the Trace & Refere...
Introduction As of version 17 Archicad can directly save and open Stereolitography (.stl) files using the built-in STL In-Out Add-On. STL File Format STL files only carry the surface geometry of a 3D model without any additional information such as c...
Introduction There is a large number of .xml files called plotter drivers shipped with ARCHICAD. They are located in a folder named PlotWare within the main folder of ARCHICAD. These files contain some basic information (e.g. maximum paper size, size...
PlotMaker was a layouting program that was part of the ARCHICAD package. This standalone application was optimized to prepare an architectural documentation set based on the views, drawings and images created in ARCHICAD. PlotMaker could also accommo...
Missing Elements in 3D (and 2D) Views If you notice missing elements or a blank window, the following possibilities are worth to check: 3D There is no missing macro in libraries (this sometimes aborts model creation) No 3D cut plane is turned on (Vie...
Create Symbol Line Type In our special example we are demonstrating how to create line types with letters in it, but the described steps can be applied to any custom line type. When creating custom line types, the stencil of the symbol may be drawn o...
Best Practice Grids are best set before sharing the project. If it is necessary to edit a grid element, it is best to have all other users release their reserved elements and you reserve all of the elements in the project. If your organization is lar...
Both Printing and Plotting are available in ARCHICAD. In ARCHICAD 10, Printing and Plotting have been brought onto a “common platform” which resulted in the Print and Plot dialog boxes becoming similar to each other. However, there are still differen...
U3D (“Universal 3D”) is a file format for 3D data. It is a standardized three-dimensional data format with the purpose of facilitating 3D data exchange among programs of various kinds. Adobe Acrobat supports this format from version 7.0, so within a ...
The article is based on Dan Kunschik’s original post on ARCHICAD-Talk and has been updated for ARCHICAD 15. Summary of steps To create a curved text in ARCHICAD, a few tricks need to be employed. Text (created with the TextTool) can not be curved, so...
This document was prepared in response to the Archicad-Talk question of when to use the Figure Tool rather than the Drawing Tool.The Drawing and Figure tools are Archicad features that allow the user to deal with drawings and images. Even though thos...
Files saved from ARCHICAD in 2D formats (PDF, DWG, DWF...) can be unusually large because of fill and line types used in the drawing. "symbol" type fills and "symbol" type lines explode in DWG and PDF - one line in archicad can break up to thousands ...
This article explains how to embed one or more standard detail drawings into your Project. In this example, we will embed a balcony and Wall-Slab intersection detail into our Project, and place it onto a Layout. We will also create a marker which con...
There are several ways you can split a Line in ARCHICAD. The following describes some of the basic methods. (There are probably other methods you could come up with). Splitting a Line with Another Element In this example, we wish to cut the near-hori...
Originally published at AECBytes: http://aecbytes.com/tipsandtricks/2008/issue35-archicad.html. Written by Eric Bobrow (Principal, Bobrow Consulting Group) ARCHICAD makes it easy to create a Virtual Building, a 3D Building Information Model (BIM) of ...
In ARCHICAD 9 and earlier, measuring symbols is one issue and measuring text adds an extra complication for anyone using Imperial units (e.g., US version). This article does not apply to metric users. Marker Size: For marker size, there are at least ...
