Grasshopper - ARCHICAD Live connection: Teamwork

[Akos Karoczkai]

This article summarizes how ARCHICAD elements generated and modified by the Grasshopper - ARCHICAD Live connection behave in a Teamwork environment.

Reservation

• Elements created in a Teamwork environment from Grasshopper will be locked and reserved by the creator user.
• Elements have to be reserved in order to be modified (even if they are locked by the same user who created them and is trying to modify them).
• If an element is created with Grasshopper but it is reserved by someone else, a duplicate will be created if we try to regenerate or modify it.
• If the Grasshopper generated element is free for reservation (so it is not reserved by the user who would like to modify them from Grasshopper), and we try to modify these elements, no modifications will happen (and no duplicates are created)
• If the Grasshopper definition creates additional elements (compared to the non-reserved elements), those will be created without any problem.
• If the Grasshopper definition would delete previously created elements (which are not reserved), then the unnecessary elements will not be deleted. (I have 15 slabs, but the definition synchronisation would result in 9 slab elements, the unnecessary 6 slabs will remain in the project since they were not reserved for modification)

The general principle for reservation in a Teamwork environment regarding Grasshopper created elements is to keep them reserved by the user who is handling the Grasshopper synchronizations. Otherwise duplicate elements can show up in the project or modifications will not happen due to lack of reservation or reservation conflicts.

Attributes

Attributes are handled by ID in Grasshopper (and in ARCHICAD as well) - therefore attributes/input information will update in the GH definition if any changes are made to an attribute (whether it is the name or any other setting of the attribute (eg. composite layer numbers, thicknesses, building materials, layer name, etc.). To update the attribute information, the Grasshopper connection has to be stopped and restarted though.

SEO

• Solid Element Operations between Grasshopper generated and manually created elements will be kept if there are changes made to the Grasshopper generated element.
• If the Grasshopper generated element is deleted (due to the change of the code) and recreated, then the SEO connection will be lost because these are considered new elements with different GUIDs.

Identification of Grasshopper generated elements in the ARCHICAD project

• When the first element is created with Grasshopper in ARCHICAD, a new classification system is automatically created with the following 2 properties. After this, the two properties below will be assigned to every element, whether they were created manually or generated by grasshopper. This allows the user to use multiple Grasshopper definitions (Facade, Structure, Room arrangement) for the same ARCHICAD project while keeping the origin information of the elements.
  • Grasshopper Source Definition (file name)
  • Last update from Grasshopper (Date & Time)
• If the connection is live, by selecting an ARCHICAD node in Grasshopper will select the generated elements in the ARCHICAD project.

• If the connection is live, then clicking on elements in ARCHICAD we can select the generating node in Grasshopper from the Live connection palette.