We value your input!
Please participate in Archicad 28 Home Screen and Tooltips/Quick Tutorials survey

Libraries & objects
About Archicad and BIMcloud libraries, their management and migration, objects and other library parts, etc.

How to import DWG blocks to be used as objects (furnitures)

Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi everyone,

I need to find a way to import the hundreds of DWG blocks that the manufacturers provided me with, in archicad in order to have them always available to use them as objects.

Basically I do interior design for offices. The dwg blocks are piece of furnitures in 3d.
I used to work with autocad, but then, thank to a friend of mine, I foud Archicad much quicher in the workflow and the library/objects are great! so if i could import the dwg blocks I will switch over straight away!

Thanks in advance!
22 REPLIES 22
Anonymous
Not applicable
One more:
Scott Bulmer
Booster
Andro, thanks so much for this as it explains a lot, but it does raise a couple questions:

1) Did you first try to import the 3D DWG directly into AC and if so did it fail the same way it did for me?
2) Have you found it necessary to modify all 3D DWG files from manufacturers using Draft Sight prior to importing the objects, or only some?
3) For manufacturer's objects like this that only have one material, have you created a simplified process for scripting new material assignments for different elements of the object? I ask this as it is way beyond my skill set.

With that being said, I believe material assignment in AC would be nice but is not necessarily a deal breaker as they can be perfected later in rendering solutions like Artlantis. These single material manufacturer objects would be placed in AC basically as 'chipboard' objects to be mapped later.

Given that more manufactures are providing these 3D DWG objects, it would sure be nice if they could be simply imported and manipulated without having to learn and use an intermediate software. Maybe this will be possible in AC16, or at least can be Morphed more quickly.

Thanks again, Scott
AC27 v. 4060 w/ MEP, Cadimage, Twinmotion 2023.2.2 using AC from AC6.0, 2021 MacPro M1 chip, Adobe CC. Used AC on both platforms.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Scott,
1. On my first import I get nothing because the "Solids" option in the translator was off. On next try the object comes in rotated laying down on its back.

2. All of them

3. No. The material should be set already in the .dwg file (like the .3ds files).