Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Has anyone got any idea how you'd meet this kind of criteria for a town masterplan?

We need to design a city for around five thousand people. Now in Revit or AutoCAD architecture, you may try and do it with intelligent masses or spaces. In Modelur, you'd just do it but get stuck on the 2D print offs.

In practice, the computer model landscape will be littered with objects that sit in urban zones. These objects need to be able to return values for Gross Floor Area, Volume, Building Factor, Plot Ratio, Number of floors etc.

The zones that the building objects sit in need to return values for Total Gross Floor Area by Building Type, Average Height, Zone Total Area, Built Area on Zone etc etc.

I think you guys get my drift. Its buildings and zones - and they need to be able to return lots on numbers automatically.

Is this possible in ArchiCAD? The main killer in Revit is in creating floor levels for each mass at different heights and attaching these building objects to a zone in the city in a meaningful way. I've found postings here that seem to suggest there are similar problems in ArchiCAD.

Any suggestions or help would be hugely helpful!

Thanks in advance.

[NandoMogollon]

Hi Dave,

I think there's no big issue, this is what I would do:
- The landscape would be a mix of Meshes and Slabs.
- For Urban Zones, you can Use Zones on a particular category
- For individual Buildings you can have Zones, with additional Parameters (# of stories, or building type) added to the Stamp, so you can "extract" that information in a schedule/list.

You can also create an Object for the buildings with GDL, but then it gets more complicated.

does it helps?

Nando M

[Aaron Bourgoin]

City Engine?
http://www.procedural.com/

[Ingolf]

SketchUp and ArchiCAD work well together when forming an urban landscape. A former BIM student of mine, Torgeir Rønsen (from the Firm BIM Concept http://www.bimconcept.no/), made this City Plan when making a model of the Vestbanen Project of Statsbygg in Oslo, Norway.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

ArchiCAD is in use here in Canada bu Urban Strategies: http://www.urbanstrategies.com/

[Ingolf]

...and the attachment follows... (sorry for the Norwegian text)

[Ingolf]

ArchiCAD has detailed and powerfull possibilities to model an urban landscape even further. This plan was concieved in a single week... (From Torgeir Rønsen, http://www.bimconcept.no/)

[Anonymous]

Aaron wrote:
City Engine?
http://www.procedural.com/

WOW !

[Anonymous]

NandoMogollon wrote:
You can also create an Object for the buildings with GDL, but then it gets more complicated.

Thanks all for the great replies.

The accuracy is absolutely critical. We can fudge a urban landscape using Revit Conceptual massing tools, but what we need is for the urban landscape objects to be intelligent.

We need to pull alot of numbers, ie 5000 homes, plus schools, offices etc off the plans. Each home, office etc, needs to report a Gross Floor Area, a Plot Ratio, Urban Zone name and so on.

This all needs to be done fast. So when you place an office, you can just grab the top of it in CAD, drag it up to make it taller, pull the side to make it fatter and bingo, all the numbers appear in the schedule automatically (floor area, number of floors, height, zoning)...,place an automatic tag on it, then on to the the next building.

Incredibly, only the free Sketcup plugin called Modelur http://www.modelur.com/ comes close, but it doesn't allow multiple urban zones, and it doesn't have a 2D printing ability (ie no tags for buildings and zones)

I noticed that there were issues with storey settings in a multiple building landscape as reported here which sounds very similar to Revit, afterall these are programs for designing a building, not cities. The other limitation, out of interest in Revit, is there is a 5000ft limit to the width of the model.

We don't really mind, maybe, on getting involved in GDL if it solves the problem - but then equally, we could go down the VBA route in Autocad.

I couldn't get the http://www.bimconcept.no/ link to work but I may be able to hunt down some posting by Urbanstrategies on forums somewhere to find out how they built their city models in ArchiCAD and if they were blocks or intelligent blocks they used.

Any more thoughts would be hugely welcome!

[Ingolf]

Hello Helsinki_Dave!

My former students work to form the Firm BIM Concept, and their Web Site isn't up and go yet. I harrass them the best I can so the Web Site becomes public...

Another firm made by former students is BIM Consult...
www.bimconsult.no (The text is in Norwegian...)