Handing house designs

[Marcel Cooper]

When working on larger site layouts, we will hand house designs - am I alone in seeing the need for the facility to produce handed house designs from the original. hand. This was something that I used to be able to do with Microstation without effort, but when I raised the subject with Graphisoft, I was told that I was a lone voice and nobody else has wanted/needed this - are they correct? 

[Barry Kelly]

You can place as a hotlink and mirror it as you place it.

Or maybe you could model an entire reversed model as a design option and choose that as you place it.

Barry.

[Marcel Cooper]

Thanks Barry, but you miss my point entirely.

Of course a hotlink model can be handed but I want to be able to produce handed construction drawings.

At present there is no facility to create these without creating a file, hotlinking in the original file and mirroring it, which works for the model and all plan information, but falls on its snout with the section.

Archicad should have ability to simply print off a handed version of the construction drawings - it would save those of us involved in large multi unit schemes a fortune in time spent on CAD.   

[AllanP]

The problem with mirroring a house design is all those internal elevations and where they are on the layout page, how they are numbered, etc..

there is a way to deal with it manually, but it has to be considered before you document the house.

this is a common problem for volume builders when they offer house plans.

when we were using Archiad 12, the mirroring of hotlinks for townhouses resulted in huge problems.

In theory, you can get an API to do it (the updates in the API language for Archiad 28 finally looks like it can be all done with a single button click, fingers crossed this time it will work that way...27 was almost there, but missing 1 command I needed)

[Botonis]

There were some comments here about the Insiders and I was about to answer?????

Have they got deleted?????

[Xandros]

maybe you're talking about this topic?
https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/General-discussions/Correcting-old-problems-before-issuing-new-s...

[Marcel Cooper]

With respect to the text mirroring, I have found that using fully justified text for alignment removes problems with the mirrored view.

I confess to not knowing what an API is, so your second paragraph went right over my head!   

[Marcel Cooper]

Yes and no. The mirroring issue is one that has annoyed me since I first started with Archicad and is a facility that just isn't there and as I was told by Archicad, isn't something that users seem to want - other than me.

The forum item about not correcting old problems before issuing new software relates to many issues & bugs that just aren't corrected.

For example, since about V17, the co-ordinate object has been a piece of rubbish to use and is virtually impossible to adapt to an auxiliary co-ordinate system - on the last scheme, we spent hours trying to resolve this and Archicad support were willing but kept sending explanatory videos which didn't address our problem. In the end, we had to abandon the idea of putting co-ordinated on our highways setting out drawing and rely on our surveyors Autodesk software to sort this - how embarrassing. 

Also, V27 introduced a major and long overdue set of revisions to MEP but the pipework tools were riddled with error - have they been remedied by V28, I don't think they have been touched and my suspicion is that there was a budget allocation for MEP revision in V27 and none in V28 so those of us that use MEP will have to suffer bodged workarounds arounds until there is another budget allocation.

I have the growing feeling that there aren't many people in the development office who have actually used the software to produce genuine working drawings (not just throwing around a few walls, plonking on a roof and some doors/windows in a software demonstration) and so they often don't understand what design offices need to achieve.

[AllanP]

An API(Application Programming Interface) is an external program done to interface with Archicad.

they are called add-ons

Generally it is done in C++.

an example is the goodies set of tools,(check duplicates)

https://graphisoft.com/resources-and-support/downloads?section=add-on

This is different from doing a GDL object that can be quickly edited inside Archicad.

The people that produce API's doing full programming in a separate environment

(Microsoft visual studio is the recommended developer environment).

There is information in this forum for the people developing API's, but unless you already can program in C++, it will take a long time to learn.

[mthd]

Hi @Marcel Cooper, this an example of an API called transformer from CI tools that can mirror a plan and the views are also mirrored. Please watch this short video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6XC8K8p6o

This may assist you in your workflow ?