archicad for consulting engineers??

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am a CAD Manager in a consulting engineering firm (civil,landscape, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing). I am doing research into the different BIM/PEN/Virtual Building products on the market.

I am curious if there are any add-ons for archicad to make it useful for the engineering disciplines. I am imagining a time when the entire project will be done this way, coordination will be real time, interferences will be automatically detected, etc.

Currently from what I've found the most inclusive product is Bentley. They've got something for everyone but I'm not positive I like the direction they're taking in the approach towards the Building Model.

Revit is currently working on a structural package and MEP is to follow (can't get a specific date on any of them).

Archicad is a mystery to me.

Any input would be greatly appreciated,

Rick

[Anonymous]

tprokop wrote:
We now run Archicad for our architectural department but found it limited for engineering needs so our engineering runs Building Systems...The key to it all is to make sure your set-up and standards work in translation between the formats.

Can you pull the Building Systems objects into ArchiCAD? If so, does it do a decent job? What kind of elements does ArchiCAD use to represent the objects?

Can you do the opposite -- pull full 3D ArchiCAD models into Building Systems? If so, is it any good?

[ricki-fritz]

I agree that we don't want ArchiCAD to have all the features that are specific to engineers, or any other discipline for that matter - it's for Architects!

We NEED to be able to collaborate with other consultants - getting people to understand what BIM is all about is the first step.

What is needed, however, are Exporters & Importers to the software packages that are being used by the consultants (whatever they may be).

This process (and the files that are transferred) should be:
1 - 3D elements
2 - the elements must have information related to them (BIM, afterall...)
3 - capable of being imported BACK into ArchiCAD (as ArchiCAD native objects, slabs, beams, etc), with options to add the additional components that have been designed (such as ductwork, etc. from HVAC consultants) or to replace (or merge to separate layer) selected elements (such as beams & columns, if the Structural engineers has calculated alternative sizes)

IFC seems to be the platform from which this may be possible. However, the issue is:

Who will DEVELOP these exporters & importers??? I have yet to see this process (even 3D/BIM export from ArchiCAD to external software) - please enlighten me if others have seen...

Ricki

[Djordje]

ricki_faris wrote:
IFC seems to be the platform from which this may be possible. However, the issue is:

Who will DEVELOP these exporters & importers??? I have yet to see this process (even 3D/BIM export from ArchiCAD to external software) - please enlighten me if others have seen...

IFC is the only viable option, as there is a chance of a snowball in hell of any software company opening up the file format or unifying the file format.

However, if your goal is structural and HVAC design with two way compatibility, there are a few solutions that run nicely - like AxisVM and Ductwork for example.

It is a matter of everybody adopting IFC fully; this is a danger for the market share, because instead of strongarming the client into using only their specific solutions, the clients all of a sudden can choose the software that does the job instead of carrying the right label.

No, we are not there by a long shot ... sadly so.