Coordinate List?

[Anonymous]

Is there any way to generate a txt. file consisting of a list of coordinates of any element? I want to produce a list of construction staking coordinate info. I have searched through the entire calculate menu to find some way to generate some x,y,z info of a hotspot,column,elevation dimension anything! No luck! I would be willing to pay for some help generating an object or GDL script to do this. Any help much appreciated!

[Karl Ottenstein]

This should let you get what you want, Mark. If not, it lets me share yet another strange feature of ArchiCAD. 😉

The Special Menu has an option to save the contents of the 3D window as vertices, edges, and other primitives. You are only interested in vertices: the x, y and z coordinates of the corners of polygons.

In the screenshot, I've drawn a slab and a column in metric ... because ArchiCAD operates internally in metric and the output is in metric ... so this was the easiest way for me to verify the numbers were right. You'll have to convert to FFI of course.

Choose Save GDL from the Special Menu and GDL 3D as the type.

Open the file and delete (or have software ignore) all lines other than the VERT lines. (My column was .1m wide, 3m high, and sitting on top of a .5m high slab at a corner located at (2m, 0m). The slab is 2m x 3m x .5m All comes through nicely - even tabbed!)

If you only want the x, y, z coordinates of certain locations, select just those 'marker' objects before generating the 3D ... and only their coordinates will be output. If your marker is a cube shape with 8 vertices like the illustration, then if you always place the smallest x,y,z coordinate on your intended point, it would be easy to have a tiny program eliminate all of the other points, too. Maybe a 3D hotspot would generate a single VERT ... I didn't spend any more time exploring.

Interesting, huh?

Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Part 2.

OK. I couldn't resist the challenge. Someone else may have a better solution.

I wanted to make a 'marker object' that you could plop down at points that you wanted output. For 2D, I just used a circle with crosshairs and a hotspot in the middle. The 3D became tricky. The easiest thing for output is for the 3D script to have nothing but a VERT 0, 0, 0 in it ... and then the output file would only have the desired coordinates. But, this is invisible in the 3D window and wouldn't allow you to visually drag the marker up and down to snap it to vertical height. So... I went for just a 3D line to allow 3D editing.

To output your coordinates, use Find and Select to select all of these marker elements, then go to 3D and save as in the tip below. The first coordinate of every pair is the coordinate that you want. The second (top point of the line) can be discarded.

2D script:
---------------------
HOTSPOT2 0, 0

CIRCLE2 0, 0, A/2

! Crosshairs
LINE2 -A/2, 0, A/2, 0
LINE2 0, -A/2, 0, A/2


3D script:
----------------------
LIN_ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1


Karl

[Petros Ioannou]

There is also an xyz locator object which can be downloaded from http://www.archiradar.com/eng/objects/al2d02.htm

HTH
Petros

[Djordje]

Also check http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=10598#10598