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

Parametric design
About Rhino & Grasshopper and PARAM-O.

PARAM-O

Gordana Radonic
Community Manager
Community Manager
Hello everyone,

Have you started using PARAM-O? What are your impressions, experiences so far? Any examples to share?

I am curious to hear what do you think about it.

Kind regards,
Gordana

Gordana Radonić

Community Manager

26 REPLIES 26
Jan Vlach
Advocate
Podolsky wrote:
My opinion that PARAM-O is quite limited in term of modelling capabilities. PARAM-O is generating GDL script, that later ArchiCAD is reading.
Knowing GDL well - it's possible to achieve much faster better results. But only if you know GDL well.

But it's good tool to start learning GDL.
I wholeheartedly agree with Podolsky apart form one thing: You will be able to grasp some of the concepts (and limitations) behind param-o much faster if you know at least basics of gdl coding.
On that front, I was very dissapointed how much messy the code coming from param-o is.

Now to my personal experiences: I have opened it for a first time about a week ago. My goal is to eventually create a series of historical windows objects.

The idea being I will be able to put measurments into archicad as I am on the site. The logic of measuring and the measurment you get is very different from what you would imput into traditional archicad window object. And as we are leading practice in conservation projects it seems to us to develop a custom object for most common (historical) window types is worth the effort. Or at least it would if param-o was a little bit smarter.
Currently, as far as I am aware there are serve limitations to what can be achived and I personally got quite discuraged when i realized that very likely this tool is not (yet anyway) mature enough to achiveve what I want it to. Currently I have a frame for what Germans call "KASTENFENSTER" (not sure if such windows were used much outside europe)

The limitations I have encoutred so far are that it is very complicated to do anything that curves and bends and honestly I dont understand why primitives such as arc, arch and so on are not avalible inside gdl for years. Lack there of must make the work for the library developer, even inside graphisoft, very dificult indeed. Some of those limitations could, ofcourse, be resolved by having the ability to stetch profile along curve, but currently that is not a featute that param-o posseses. Or if it does, then it is not documented very well.
Which neatly brings me to the next, and biggest gripe with it: The documentation for the nodes is completely unusable and does not explain anything. in stark kontrast to the gdl guide (and archicad help) that is actually fairly usable.

The last gripe I have with param-o (and I hope this get resulted pretty quickly) is that if you want to do something more complex, it is greatly advatgeous to make few simple scripts and call it from the other. In my window example, I wanted to make separate param-o, that will be the window frame, and insert into it another script that will be the wing - opening part of the window - However currently only four parametes can be edited in the nested object and that is nowhere near enough to work for me (actually five could work in this case but I degess)
it would be cool if more paramtres could be added for a single library part.
Also there needs to be more of actuall programing possibilites - all those if, else and so on. Also it would be very good if graphisoft made some functions more accesible than the gdl - for example if you programed a editable hostsot in gdl you know the pain of putting in one point for the start then another for the end and then adding witchcraft to make it actually manipulate some value. It would be great if hotspots were already one box i just plug stuff in.

And one other small request in the end - it would be awesome to be able to select part of the resulting geometry in the preview window and had have the responsible node highlighted. This would do so much for more complex work, debugging and so on.

And here is the fruit of my param-o work so far. (please ignore the cube in the bottom. It is soon to be a bottom frame of the window)
From Archicad 8.5 all the way to the present.
Passionate Autocad hater as well.
Wish to save palets and menus individualy in work enviroments:
https://bit.ly/3pg3Bx7
Rajesh Patil
Expert

Hello Everyone, I have started to explore Param-O and found it interesting for making needful customization easily as per project needs. Just posted few video clips on my YouTube Channel. If anyone is interested can visit there and explore the given examples. It would be great if you can send me your feedback especially if I can improve somewhere on the programing point. Regards. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw82vkgAgA1UI7WAsmIWjIEOSrg1qbR1A

Rajesh Patil
AC 09-27 | INT | WIN11 64
Dell Inspiron 7591, Core i9, 9880H 2.30GHz, 16.0GB, NVidia GeForce GTX1650, 4.0GB, SSD Internal 500GB, Dell SSD External 250GB

Hi, I hope you are looking for something like this. Download and check this video clip.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TqtknHP1wRnTiDe_GB9zUjiazXQS2Juq/view?usp=sharingParam-O Tube.png

Rajesh Patil
AC 09-27 | INT | WIN11 64
Dell Inspiron 7591, Core i9, 9880H 2.30GHz, 16.0GB, NVidia GeForce GTX1650, 4.0GB, SSD Internal 500GB, Dell SSD External 250GB
Ingolf
Advocate

I think Parma-O is a good answer to Revit's family editor. Someone has said that Param-O's features resembles Archicad 2. Param-O does a sufficient job making parametric 3D-objects. For the Norwegian audience I have made a quite visual booklet on GDL and Param-O. A small part of the booklet is attached here. Graphisoft: I really hope for more tools inside Param-O. And for more instruction videos.


Page 78 copies in Param-O.png
Ingolf Sundfør, Bricklayer, Author of several Real Life Problem Solving Books for Archicaddicts in Norway.
PC/i7/W11/ArchiCAD 6.5-27
ashwani
Participant

HI,

I was working on some objects but i stucked when i need to create custom 3D text. I will be obliged if someone could help on that.

 

Thanks

I guess you have posted on wrong forum. Still the one possible answer for your 3D text requirement is from "Object" tool "3D Text"

2022-11-07 (1).png

Rajesh Patil
AC 09-27 | INT | WIN11 64
Dell Inspiron 7591, Core i9, 9880H 2.30GHz, 16.0GB, NVidia GeForce GTX1650, 4.0GB, SSD Internal 500GB, Dell SSD External 250GB

Thanks for reply Rajesh!

My question is that- Can we create parametric 3D text in Param O? Yes it's already available in objects but Is it possible to create 3D text (like 3D Room Tagging) in Param O as like Dynamo?

ashwanikumarshukla_0-1667817674157.png

 

Ashwani Kumar Shukla

Archicad 12-26, 64gb ram, window 10