I would like to propose a workflow enhancement for Archicad: an option that automatically aligns the Survey Point and Project North to the coordinate system embedded in an imported, geo-referenced DWG file.
In practice, most architects still receive their topographic survey as a geo-coded DWG in a national reference system. To use that drawing, and keep our project geo-coded, we currently follow this workflow:
- Import or X-ref the DWG,
- Rotate it and position it to match the building model (we keep the building aligned to Archicad's UCS),
- Manually move the Survey Point to the DWG’s (0, 0) origin and rotate Project North to match the true north of DWG.
Because the DWG origin is often kilometers from Archicad’s project origin, steps 2 and 3 are prone to error, and sometimes need several attempts to get it right, wasting time and sometimes driving me crazy...
DWG export works great - When we need to send consultants a DWG in geo-referenced coordinates, we use DWG Translator’s Save Options → Match file origin = Survey Point setting.
Please add an “Acquire Coordinates from DWG” (or similar) command that:
- Moves the Survey Point to that DWG base point,
- Sets Project North to the DWG’s north direction (if supplied), or to a user-defined reference.
I believe this enhancement would save so much time, reduce human error and streamline site and topography setup for everyone who works with geo-referenced DWGs, especially if this implementation would be combined with the idea proposed on another thread (Drawing tool - automatically coordinated with Surv... - Graphisoft Community).
Thank you for considering this request.
Open