We value your input!
Please participate in Archicad 28 Home Screen and Tooltips/Quick Tutorials survey

Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Real Curves in Archicad

Anonymous
Not applicable
Happy new Year everyone God Bless you in this new year!

I'm have a problem with segmented geometry in elevation. In the office I work we are designing a classic building with a lot of details and a lot of rounded things (see the attached pics) and all rounded geometry is segmented in elevations and sections, and 1st it doesn't look good, 2nd I can't measure radius of the rounded windows, 3rd this bring workarounds that I need to make to get things right and to look professional.
See the attachments how everything is segmented.

And my question is, Is there a way to make this geometry as real curves without segmentation and that I can take radius from it?
The first pic is the main elevation

123456.PNG
25 REPLIES 25
Anonymous
Not applicable
arqrivas wrote:
Hi, Sjoelte, Check this Tutorial for the Profiles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqSYH9p4e8&list=PL5ECBFDEA4B6CB1AA&index=50

thanks!
Anonymous
Not applicable
Hello everyone, I just want to give some more emphasis to this wish, because is affecting my work too much already.

I think that Archicad is a very professional Architectural software by the summary of it's features, I think it has features that are ahead of the competency, and I chose to use Archicad some years ago (in version 10) and after evaluating others programs throughout the years I still prefer Archicad, but apart from all the nice features of Archicad the modeling kernel looks like from the 80's when it comes to advance modelling and curves.

Here are two example of different projects I've been working in, in #1 this design should be very simple to model, but whoever has done something like this, should know how many workaround and extra work are added when modeling these curves profiles and when documenting and cutting sections of this type of design, also the plan does not look perfect, and in #2 I model most of the things you see there in Archicad and others were brought in from others 3d softwares, and again the inaccuracies of curves affect the modeling and documentation of the design, I had to redraw the elevation in 2d to document the radius and some others detail in order to have a nice and clean elevation(generating an elevation from this take about 10 minutes in my pc and is impossible to work with it because is too slow), so there is too much of workarounds and extra work when you are dealing with curves in your design, unless are simple curves in plan view.

I would like to know how these big firms using Archicad that design those curved buildings document all the radius of the curves, because even in flexible tools like the Shell and morph you can't have real curves either documented the right way.

I just really wish Archicad integrate completely the NURBS or any other real curves kernel, because this is the only architectural program that has not update the modeling functions to have real curves, it shouldn't be a workaround to annotate the arch radius of a simple arched window in the elevation.
alemanda
Advocate
Erwin wrote:
I vaguely remember there was a setting you could change in the registry to allow for more segments on the curve.

Might have been for shells though.
I remember too ...
I found that here
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Graphisoft\ArchiCAD-64\ArchiCAD-64 19.0.0 ITA R1\GSModeler

I don't have time to test now ... but it seems that you can adjust the segmentation of some curved shapes ...
AC27 latest hotfix

Win 10 Pro 64bit

Double XEON 14 CORES (tot 28 physical cores)

32GB RAM - SSD 256GB - Nvidia Quadro K620

Display DELL 25'' 2560x1440

www.almadw.it
Erwin Edel
Rockstar
The out-of-the-box arc resolution for Shells is pretty low though and it's very annoying that if you have two similar curves meeting in a 'gothic' arch, these do not have a similar break of line segments.

I can sort of live with the segmentation, but this part makes modelling horizontal planes that meet those curves on symmetric intersections really annoying (pretty hard to describe the problem).
Erwin Edel, Project Lead, Leloup Architecten
www.leloup.nl

ArchiCAD 9-26NED FULL
Windows 10 Pro
Adobe Design Premium CS5
Anonymous
Not applicable
The problem with the segmentation is that they will never be real curves, and will do two main things that affect our workflows, 1- because of the way the program needs to calculate segmentation, the more segments the heavier the file, while with real curves like NURBS this is not true we can have a nice curve with a fragment of the memory compare to segments, and 2- regardless of the amount of segments they will never be curves, thereby we will never be able to document it the right way without adding extra work.

It is not only about segmentation and how things look, but also about annotations (because everything or most of the thing we model need to be annotated in order to be build).

And I won't be saying this if others software less professional than Archicad had solved this, I will really love to see Archicad with a real good modeling core.

BTW here is a wish about this: http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=255076&highlight=real+curves#255076
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
Looks like they are working on it:

http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/?s=nurbs&versions=Versions

Hopefully they will not stop halfway to the finish line.
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator