Renewed Additional Surface Catalog

[Emoke Csikos]

The Additional Surface Catalog needed an update

Our users’ essential wish was to update the Additional Surface Catalog. The previous catalog did not fully support the new rendering capabilities within Archicad with the default settings, which required more manual workarounds. In addition, the surfaces in the catalog were not always suited to follow the latest residential and commercial design trends.

Fresh, contemporary surfaces for realistic renders

The Additional Surface Catalog is one of the many benefits offered to our Graphisoft Forward and SSA customers. The Additional Surface Catalog, containing several hundreds of surfaces, has been completely renewed with Archicad 26.

It works the same way as before: you load the Additional Surface Catalog into your active project libraries and import the necessary surfaces into the attribute set.

To read the detailed workflow description and download the catalog, go to this article.

The Additional Surface Catalog for Archicad 26 is entirely new. This is what you need to know about it:

• The catalog includes both new surfaces and modernized versions of surfaces already included in the previous versions, keeping up with the industry's latest rendering and outdoor visualization workflows and trends. The overall number of surfaces has increased significantly.
• The new catalog is fully compatible with Archicad’s built-in rendering engine, Cineware, which means less manual setup to achieve the desired results.
• The previous and the new catalogs are not compatible; thus, we recommend loading both the previous and the new catalogs when working on migrated projects.
• We recommend starting new projects with the new catalog loaded.

Create high-quality visualizations

Use the renewed surface catalog to create better and modern visualizations of your design intent for faster approval from your clients.

Learn about all the new visualization features of Archicad 26:

• BIMx: More functional BIMx Web and Desktop Viewer​s

To learn more about all the new features of Archicad 26, read this article.

[qingdom]

Hi, is there a way to import all surfaces from the catalog and not wasting time to add one by one?

[Barry Kelly]

Yes ...

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Visualize-articles/Additional-Surface-Catalog-for-Forward-and-SS...

Barry.

[qingdom]

Cool! this is time saver.

Regarding this surface catalog, can we remove somehow the 26 from the name?

Cause it's messing up when i add them to the project.

Example: If i want to add them as append they will duplicate the existing one (i have Brick and i will have Brick 26 again). The only way is to add them as by name so they 'intersect' but the new surface catalog has 26 in the name is still duplicating them 🙂

Or is there any other way to not have duplicates?

[Barry Kelly]

I would keep the numbers so you know where they came from.

The 26 surfaces have 'new and improved' settings I believe (some of them anyway), so it is probably good to have a duplicate.

You could then 'Delete' the old surface with the 'Replace' option so know the new surface is used.

Keep track of the old index number and you can then 'Re-index' the new material after you delete and replace the old material, so you now have the new surface using the old index number.

That way if you copy and paste from other old files, you won't end up with duplicate surfaces again.

And if you really want to, you can rename the surface now and lose the '26' - but I wouldn't.

A bit of a long winded process I know, but attribute index numbering can be very important.

Barry.