We are working for several years syrveying old buildings and monuments with a total station. We are using a total station and then through a series of imports and exports using autocad we finally reach the gdl object you will see in the attached drawings. The object is created when importing a dwg file where the points are reported as blocks, only in archicad 8.0 and then needs to be elaborated in the 3d and 2d script.
Unfortunately this cannot be done straightforward on archicad and my knowledge on GDL cannot go further, as my job is an architect and not a software developer. In fact, archicad lacks of critical functions in importing and exporting data for total stations. As an example, after having designed a nice house on archicad it needs to be traced on the terrain. There is not any function on archicad for exporting a txt of xls file with point names and their 3d coordinates. I have tried many different solutions with 3d objects but none of them is practical in terms of real-world construction. At the end, after 12 years of using archicad I tend to think that it is an excelent design tool but it lacks of professional tools for building the projects. ...and there comes autocad, which is a nightmare but it is for building. And at the end of the day this is our job!