Quick test with ArchiCAD 18 and Unity 5

[stefan]

With the new version of Unity 5 released this week, I did a (very quick) export of an ArchiCAD model to Cinema 4D and exported as FBX from there on. This was loaded inside a new Unity 5 project.

Some minor tweaking and adding a simple First Person Controller from the default Unity installation resulted in this nice interactive scene.

Remember: this contains some errors: there are texture mapping errors (introduced in the translation between ArchiCAD and Cinema 4D) and you can fall of the ground and fall into infinity, with no way to get back 😉

http://www.sbuild.com/Unity

[Marky]

stefan wrote:
With the new version of Unity 5 released this week, I did a (very quick) export of an ArchiCAD model to Cinema 4D and exported as FBX from there on.

http://www.sbuild.com/Unity

Why don't use dae or obj extension and avoid C4D? Better texture control? Lumion, LumenRT or Twinmotion read them with no problems.

[Anonymous]

What is the benefit of the FBX conversion?

I'm saving directly into the Assets folder using the "Export to Cinema 4D" option from the Photo Rendering Settings.

Unity imports the C4D file beautifully.

[stefan]

I was using Cinema 4D as the Exchange plugin provides good integration between Cinema4D and ArchiCAD. You could directly place the C4D file in the Unity Assets Folder and have Unity do the conversion in the background (but this does exactly the same: open Cinema4D and export an FBX file). It is convenient to skip this step, but you lose control. I noticed that there are often some texture mapping errors in the imported ArchiCAD file. You can not solve them (easily) in Unity, but you can inside Cinema 4D. However, you have to take care to do this with the UVW gizmo editing and not by setting the tiling in the Material tag in Cinema 4D.

So doing it in two steps gives you control over situations like these.

Use DAE or OBJ is indeed an alternative, but I have found more problems from ArchiCAD models. The best results I got were from FBX files.

Other engines might benefit from different workflows, that is true.

[Marky]

Saving in Archicad as dae file gives me also a textures folder. And putting both in Assets makes a smooth transfer of textures, materials and geometry as well.
But the problem starts when it comes to reflections, texture baking and GI. Scripting and so on is overwhelming and time consuming too much, IMHO. Powerful software and a beautiful real time visualization, nevertheless needs a pretty big time investment to get to know it well.

[stefan]

It gets tricky pretty fast.

E.g. Wavefront format comes in nicely (graphically) but all pivots end up on the model origin and not in the object origin. This is not good when you need to e.g. rotate a door.

E.g. 3ds format has issues with certain materials and normals.

E.g. C4D is pretty solid, but I have occasional UV-mapping errors.
But you get a decent ArchiCAD hierarchy (including door leaf as separate geometry) and objects are named with their ID, which opens better integration for e.g. linking with original objects. (guid would be more robust).

E.g. DAE requires manual unpacking of Google Earth export file.
I get the textures, but the model seems to only have a single material instead of the correct individual materials.

E.g. SketchUp Export (and then to FBX from SketchUp) gives a single Mesh. Looks fine, but little use for adding interaction.

[Marky]

C4D needs C4D (at least $1k for the basic version).

"DAE requires manual unpacking of Google Earth export file."
Don't know what you mean, I don't need to unpack anything when saving as Collada DAE. It might be a case with KMZ extension (Google Earth), which is really packed DAE file.

Anyway, I've seen your training videos offerings and I'm thinking about if it really pays to go deeper in Unity when I'm pretty fine with OctaneRender which is great for stills in terms of time and quality.
Looking for something more convincing than BIMx for real time project investigation by clients, anyway. Here Unity looks pretty promising.

[stefan]

C4D requires non-free C4D. Very true. It depends on your projects if that is worth it.

How do you export to DAE directly from ArchiCAD? I can export to KMZ (Google Earth), rename kmz to zip, unpack and open DAE, but that is not very well structured for Unity.

BIMx = fine for one-click export (and doing Radiosity calculation afterwards in the BIMx software).

Unity = flexible but you need to do the effort: develop scripts. That said, some of the basic interaction in BIMx is straightforward to implement and then you can reuse it afterwards. And then you are in an advanced Game Engine, with more control: graphics, effects, sound, other characters, network integration, custom interactions (opening doors, switching lights, animated curtains, rippling water...).

However, there is much more to BIMx that makes it still compelling in many situations.

And OctaneRender is targeted at rendering final animation movies (= no interaction at all), just like Lumion, I guess. I don't think you can export to a realtime interactive environment, do you?

[Marky]

"How do you export to DAE directly from ArchiCAD?"
See attached picture.

"I don't think you can export to a realtime interactive environment, do you?"

No, you don't.

[stefan]

That seems an additional Collada Exporter, which is installed with Lumion. Would be nice to see if it provides a better model structure than the Google Earth exporter.

lumion3d.com/archicad-to-lumion-bridge/

Alas, this is Windows-only...