Archicad at Texas A&M - Class project.

[Anonymous]

I am a graduate student at Texas A&M and we are using Archicad in our studio project this semester. Our project is to use design a new downwtown area for College Station, where Texas A&M is located. Currently, there is no real downtown, just suburbia.

Our assignment is to master plan this downtown area and then pick a building within the plan and design it. We are now designing our buildings.

We are trying to make a "master file" where we can hotlink all of our buildings to so that we can see how all of the buildings interact with one another.

I'm having difficulty setting this up because of each project's story settings. Each project has different floor to floor heights. Is there a way to hotlink a building in without altering it's story levels?

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

If all students don't share exactly the same file template (if they are not using the same attributes, and if it would be a headache to transfer new 'standard' attributes to all projects) the easiest way is to get all students to save all projects as 3D objects, and then place those individually in the project. The downside is that you can't really set up a lot of views with that --objects don't allow you the display options you have when you are handling elements (slabs, walls, doors, etc.), so you can't extract plans, sections, can't even define layer combinations for different 3D model views. But it is easy to do and requires no setup or management of any kind at the individual student project file level.

If you do share a template, or unifying attributes from now on could be an option, read about hotlinked modules. Unless you are needing to extract say plans for all levels (ground floor and each story up) for the whole project, a cool way of handling this specific situation would be to get each student to publish story modules and place them on a 'multistory building model transfer' file of his own, created exclusively for transferring to the site model, in which each student places and stacks all stories in a single ArchiCAD story (elevating each module to its proper elevation, but keeping it in that story). From there each student publishes a module of that story, and it is that one that gets placed only once on your site file (alternatively, no module publishing and the hotlink is made directly from the file --requires less management, but also requires students to absolutely not touch and mess up the 'building model transfer file', because updates to the site file are automatic as opposed to controlled by Publishing). The advantage of this scheme is that it allows you to handle model view options, layer combinations, etc., and it also allows you to easily handle a single model in which all buildings have different story heights (each individual user controls that for each building, can change it at any time, etc. --the site model receives a 'single story' stack). All links are live --with changes to a project file, the student just Publishes and the 'single-story-stack' updates automatically --it involves a little more initial setup, but then updating is automatic, which is not the case with objects.
In terms of floor plans you can at best extract ground floor site plans with this scheme (unless you have a perfect control of automatic displays in all elements in all projects, which I would think might be shooting too high in a school project), or 'plans' for other levels created out of a 3D drawing --but normally this is not a problem with urban site plans. Because you have layer combinations, you could still tell each student to draw a 'building outline', say, or zones, in a specific layer, so you keep the ability of creating ground floor site diagrams and multistory 3D views, live.

If you absolutely need full site plans for each level, you need to place each building story module individually on the site file, and you need a careful setup if each project has different story heights. There have been many threads about this scheme.

[Steve Jepson]

Use the Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended as the common backdrop for the site plan.
Hot links to each individual building can be placed in the PDF that will open up the individual ArchiCAD building files when you click on it. I don't see advantage in trying to put all of those buildings into a single ArchiCAD model.

[Anonymous]

Hi,
If you are talking about hotlink each building (3D) into your master site plan, without changing storey level, you can think of OBJECT.
Save each of your building as ArchiCAD object and place them into your master site plan.
Hope it helps
cheers,

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the help! Ignacio. It seems like the object creation method will be the way to go. We may also experiment with saving everything in 3ds format and exporting to sketchup (not my favorite option honestly). About 3/4's of the class are using ArchiCad and the others are using different softwares. 3ds seems like it is the common format that everyone can save.

The studio has been quite the learning experience. We have been studying the tenants of urban design. We have really been focusing on how the buildings interact and connect to the street. Hence the reasoning behind a common site model.

I will keep everyone posted on our progress.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Whenever I import the buildings as objects it gives the following error message. What does this mean...

Curved flag set for body without any curved pgon.

Thanks,
Brad

[Anonymous]

I'm still getting about 1000 of the "Curved flag set for body without any curved pgon." messages, is there a setting that I'm missing?

Whenever I exit out of the message, objects in the model do not show up.

Thanks!

[Laszlo Nagy]

My guess is that this is a GDL error message.
Your geometry was probably not converted properly.
It basically says that there is no curved edges in the imported geometry, but the GDL script says that there are and the program cannot handle this descrapency.
I would send this as a bug report to your local reseller.

[Anonymous]

I had have this message too. I did not try to search for the real cause (I did not matter in my case). It might be caused by creating an object within ArchiCAD with Save 3D model as in binary mode. Try to save it again and then use the option Editable GDL Script (Save 3D model as dialog box)