ArchiCAD / Rhino Connection Announced

[Aaron Bourgoin]

This was just posted on Facebook: http://www.graphisoft.com/info/news/press_releases/graphisoft-announces-rhinoceros-archicad-connecti...

[Laszlo Nagy]

stefan wrote:
And the day Grasshopper becomes cross-platform (still hoping) it might also be relatively easy to support the OSX version of ArchiCAD.

I think they are working on the Mac version of Grasshopper to be able to release it as soon as possible:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/grasshopper-for-mac

[stefan]

I've heard from one of their teachers that they had a version running internally a few years ago already.

ASAP is a very relative statement.

The way McNeel evolves is slowly but steadily. They take their time, but then release very decent and well engineering software.

The power of tying into OS APIs is also its constraint... Although the Mono project, the work from Xamarin and the announcement of Microsoft to Open Source (parts of) the .NET Framework do affirm a possible future for Grasshopper on OSX.

[Anonymous]

After taking a break from some deadlines, I watched the video again. It's fast paced so I had to stop it a few times to get what was going on. I'll be very interested to see how far this goes in it's integration with ArchiCad. Our sister company Vectorworks is touting this within it's own software environment but I don't see how it could be as mature as the Rhino/Grasshopper solution is. I'm hoping that this is not just tacked on for promotional talking points, but something real and usable.

[stefan]

If you stop at the right time in the video, you can see the ArchiCAD-Add-in inside Rhino and what options are available.

You can see a bunch of native ArchiCAD objects (wall, beam, column, window ...) and a bunch of parameters, which seem to relate to the object parameters. So you could (all a guess from a single screenshot) have a series of walls, where start, end and height are all defined parametrically from Grasshopper logic.

For the rest, I assume, you have everything else at your disposal from Grasshopper. The thing that makes me wonder is if you would be able to define a complex Nurbs surface and somehow translate this into a "native" ArchiCAD wall. I imagine it would end up as a Morph object, but (hopefully) properly typed as Wall.

Now you'd have to be really careful with scheduling to not simply rely on native objects but also the generic objects with the same "type".

[TMA_80]

Great catch Stefan! where is the curtain wall icon? Or are there icons . ?

[stefan]

TMA_80 wrote:
Great catch Stefan! where is the curtain wall icon? Or are there icons . ?

As with many Grasshopper add-ins, it is possible that the foldout of the ribbon has additional options.

Not sure if Curtain Wall is fully supported.
There is also no word of 2D or documentation options, but considering the problems with scaleability of Grasshopper, it seems doubtful that you would elaborate a parametric design to incorporate a fully documentation construction drawing set... I believe that, just like SketchUp, Grasshopper works best for a more schematic, abstract design level, which stays light enough to be tweaked and improved.