Coordinating with consultants - best practices?

[Anonymous]

Hi,
Our architecture office is just getting started with Archicad on a pretty big project, and happily, our cunsultants are excited for BIM too (although they will be working in revit).

I need to share building model/backgrounds and title blocks with everyone. When things were 2-D, this was pretty easy. What are the best practices for sharing with BIM? At this point, they just need something so that they can get started.

Thanks,
Kristen

[TomWaltz]

Welcome to the new land of multiple backgrounds.

Title blocks will still be 2D and quite often, consultants will want 2D DWG backgrounds to work on top of.

IFC and 3D DWG are useful for exchanging models and for collision detection (assuming you are using Navis as well).

Unfortunately IFC does not link into anything, so it's something that will you will have to delete and re-import every time.

[Anonymous]

IFC is presently the only way to exchange intelligent parts between ArchiCAD, Revit and most VB/BIM savvy software, but support is varied among the vendors so the results can be a bit tricky to manage. There are ways to refine and improve the process with property sets and templates but the details will depend on the specifics of each situation.

DWG works for basic "dumb" 3D models but ArchiCAD's 3D DWG is faceted and not very pretty. It also comes into AutoCAD as one huge group which makes navigating a pain (as preselection takes forever every time you touch part of the model) so I usually explode them before I send them out to the consultants.

You can save to directly to Navis format from ArchiCAD 11 with an add-on that comes with the Navis software. It works pretty well but is a bit flaky and crashes ArchiCAD quite a bit and I don't think Autodesk much cares about this problem.

Some new softwares are using 3D DWF to good effect but presently ArchiCAD does not support this format. Since we can't count on Autodesk to maintain (or even fix) the Navis add-on this seems like the best way for GS to maintain compatibility with Navis. Whether GS chooses to commit the resources for this remains to be seen. If you want to encourage GS to 3D DWF, post on my wishlist topic at: What about DWF?