Upgrading 16 to 26

[Lee]

I am planning on making making a huge jump to a AC26 from 16. Understand that it won't be seemless but wanted to know of anything to be aware of and the validity of old project files, libraries and work environments. Any thoughts would be appreciated

[Lee Hankins · Accepted solution]

I believe old files will open in to AC26 so long as you load the Migration Libraries. Most objects should automatically upgrade to the newest library parts where they can. I know from 19 to 20 the doors changed so these will stay at the 19 versions and cabinets changed in 24-25 so these will stay at their 24 versions or earlier. A lot has been introduced since 16 and there is an excellent website that shows you the new additions. One of the biggest changes will be the introduction of Building Materials and the introduction of Renovation Filters. If you simply open old files in 26 then the Legacy settings will kick in and you would pretty much use it as you did in 16. I would strongly recommend spending some time setting up a Template for us in Archicad 26 moving forward. We open old project files as far back as Archicad 5 to use in AC26 and just spend a bit of time updating the elements and attributes, it generally takes 3-4 hours of work.

[Lee Hankins]

This is the website showing the new features version by version. Applecore Designs had a better illustration but unfortunately that doesn't exist anymore.

https://community.Graphisoft.com/t5/Let-s-get-started/Archicad-versions/ta-p/304207

[Lee]

Many thanks Lee....feeling better about it already

[Erwin Edel]

Biggest changes I can think of going from 16 to current version:

• building materials. Think of these like a container for attributes, you can set the section fill, surface and priority here. In AC16 you could set priorities from 1 to 15 (I think it was) in composites. Now you can set prioties from 1 to 999 in building materials and you add these instead of fills to your composites etc
• cinerender instead of lightworks
• no more stairmaker or railing library parts, instead you have a stair and railing tool

If you can get a good template for the current version, that is probably best going forward. If you want to bring over old projects, I find it takes me about 4-8 hours to completely change a whole project over to our current template. This is a process of purging unused attributes, copying the remaining created attributes over to some very high internal index number. Swapping the old attributes for their new copies. After this I slowly delete and replace the created building materials from the old project (which mostly make no sense) with the one in my template and thus end up with a working project. You can use migration libraries as pointed out above. If I want to continue working on an old project, I generally swap out the parts that come from migration libraries for those in the currenct version.

[Karl Ottenstein]

@Lee Lee Hankins and Edwin Edel have given you the best answers on this... particularly, Lee's mention of the Legacy settings that will allow old-style models to display correctly.  The biggest change related to the Building Materials is the Priority Based Connections (PBC) which you can learn after you complete your 16-based projects.  These material-based connections can be read about in the articles here, the manuals, and in the Graphisoft Learn courses.  Many things that in 16 and earlier required the use of the ancient "patch" tool (2D overlay) to get wall-to-wall, wall-to-slab, etc connections to appear correctly in documents can now appear correctly in 2D and 3D due to material priorities.  Once you migrate to using this new PBC system, you can disable the Legacy intersections setting in your Work Environment.

There are of course many new features ... and the article that Lee Hankins linked to is a good way to go through all of 17 through 26 to see what those are.  But they primarily provide new functionality rather than changing old methods.

[Rex Maximilian]

For that big of a jump, I would try to save a .PLA file (Archicad Archive File) so the library parts are embedded in the file. That way, they won't go missing if there are no AC26 counterparts in the migration. I would only do this for existing projects. As for your templates, I would start from scratch with a clean default and match it as close as you can. I find I need to do this every few versions or so.

As for the Work Environment, I would recommend the same. Start clean, and recreate it from scratch so that no new items are left out because of a legacy environment have the new items not show.

Good luck!

[Miha_M]

My suggestion would be to keep and finish existing projects on v16 and start new ones on v26. As said in previous comments, you can upgrade old project files into v26, but I would avoid that effort and transition risk. I never upgrade Archicad versions on a WIP project file.

Although you can archive a project into .pla and open it in a new Archicad version I prefer to use the native version if I need to access an old project. The only exception is if the new project involves an old Archicad project - in this case a project file AC version transition is necessary.

As @Erwin Edel said, I would also suggest you spend some time to find or build a good project template. Somewhere between those versions the suggested workflow, mostly on BIM enabled projects, includes intensive favorites usage with pre-set element properties (including correct ifc mapping).

[Rex Maximilian]

I agree... Unless a project is a fairly newly started one, this is my m.o. also. Easier to complete in its original version if you can.

However, I have some colleagues whose upgrading progress was necessitated by replacing a defunct machine and somehow can't run the old version on the new one running a modern OS, which is more prevalent in Macs since their OS makes running outdated software impossible sometimes... For instance, Catalina would only run 64-bit programs and not the old 32-bit ArchiCADs.

[Rex Maximilian]

The GS website (before the overhaul a couple of years ago, had a great, interactive page that outlined the new features from version to version. It was sad to see that go.