How do you do extensive interior design using ARCHICAD?

[Anonymous]

Hi,
interior workflow is really interesting inside Archicad. It's not easy but in my studio i'm implementing it not bad.
Actually we have devided the workflow in two part:

-the part of the finish, we usually manage them with the composite structure and complex profile (sadly complex profile is incompatible with the finish tags), but u can handle them also with the archicad accessories (but they not work good always).

-the part of the furniture, we have two people in the studio that model archicad objects all day long. gdl objects are the best but they are not fast and easy to program, a faster way is to use the library part maker plugin. With it u have 3 LOD that help u to use the same object in all the stage of the project. we usually model them with this max polygons: coordinating level max 250 polygons, visualization level max 2500 polygons.
Never import 3ds or other 3d files. their polygons destroy your files and also Archicad manage them very bad for the elevations.

Anyway the is not easy to explain all the workflow in a forum but we are obtaining nice results with our interior design projects.

[M Cochran]

Where I work, we limit the areas of the model where we invest the extra time to fully model the interior space with accurate finishes, furniture, etc. So, if we are going to create renderings of key areas, we will take the time to insure we are applying accurate finishes and modeling elements to a greater level of detail. Areas that we will show elevations for in our documentation, but do not need to be rendered, will be modeled but we often just use out of the box ARCHICAD finishes.

Furniture plans are typically made up of the objects from the standard ARCHICAD library and from custom modeled pieces. Occasionally we do import files from SketchUp or Revit but these require additional work to make them look clean for our plans. In general, our office doesn't worry so much about the furniture in our model looking exactly like the pieces that we specify. We use our furniture plans as a space planning tool, so overall size and location is what we care about. To help keep the ARCHICAD file size under control, furniture's 3D detail level is set to simple.

We use Microsoft Access to create a database for each of our projects. We create both finish databases and furniture databases. We create a finish schedule in ARCHICAD for the spaces and tag the finishes on elevation and in plan as needed.

[Eduardo Rolon]

Keeping the original question before banning the user for spam since there were answers in the thread

Could anybody willing to share to their workflow with interior design using ARCHICAD. And where do you get your models? And how do you optimize your scene since interior design tends to bulk up the ARCHICAD file?