Extensibility of (starter kit) archicad

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am researching the possibilities of ArchiCad and I have one very particular requirement.
I need to be able to make curtain walls that follow a double curved surface, for this I can imagine several strategies:
- Population of a Nurbs surface with custom elements.
Placement follows UV coordinates, orientation according to UV normals
- Population of a Polygon Mesh with custom elements. Placement according to face distribution and orientation according to mesh normals.

Above is controlled by Grasshopper, so I can also imagine more exotic placement control situations like csv files or 3dxml.

What it all boils down to is what kind of control Archicad will expose to me, what can I do with macros, gdl and / or the API when I buy the starter kit of Archicad.

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated,

best,
wzzl.

PS. Please help get out from under A'desks reign, I so want Archicad to work for me and I cannot afford Digital Project..... (DP's drawing generation is pretty sh*t anyway)

[Anonymous]

Do you want to do something like the picture?

[Anonymous]

Well, it starts there.

Imagine that every "hole" in this construction is filled by a facade element. Glass, steel, construction elements and a drawing placed perpendicular to the normal of every node.
Then yes, something like that.

How did you do this picture exactly ?
From a mesh modeling perspective, this is pretty easy.

Please have a look at my attachment, this one was generated with a grasshopper script, these facades and constructions are trivial to model nowadays. The challenges now are:
1) to get them to show up in a drawing
2) to automagically generate detailed drawings of every element.

In order to do this I need to be able to :
A) script and program the placement of the elements
B) script and program the generation of drawings.

Is this possible with ArchiCad (preferably with the starter edition too) ?

wzzl.

[Anonymous]

This is a variation on previous post's image.