Multiple Renovation Phases

[giovanni benetti]

Feature Request: Multiple Renovation Phases

I am an Archicad user with extensive experience in BIM modeling, and I believe an important improvement would be the ability to define multiple and sequential renovation phases beyond the existing three options: Existing, Demolished, and New Construction.

This feature would allow for:

• Tracking design variations, where changes are made to elements that were already planned in a previous phase.
• Managing complex construction workflows, avoiding the need for model duplication or cumbersome workarounds.
• Dynamic state transitions, where a "New Construction" element in one phase automatically becomes "Existing" in the next.

I recently worked on a project where this limitation made it very difficult to manage different construction phases efficiently. In Revit, this feature is already available, and its absence in Archicad significantly complicated my workflow. Implementing it would greatly enhance project flexibility and version control over time.

[Eduardo Rolon]

While you wait for the wish you can use 'Design Options" as a workaround, they are flexible enough to handle this issue.

[giovanni benetti]

Thank you for the suggestion, but Design Options are not flexible enough to fully address this issue.

For example elements marked as "New Construction" in Phase A cannot transition to "Existing" in Phase B. The only way to achieve this is by duplicating elements manually, which introduces significant risks in a BIM workflow...

[rakurs]

A workaround is always just that, a workaround. It is just a stop-gap solution until software developers bring in better solutions. Hopefully this will come sooner rather than later and we will not be forced into very strict and non-flexible solutions for too long.

[thesleepofreason]

As implemented both renovation and design option are simplistic features that offer little meaningful gain in workflow efficiency as they are completely ignorant of change forcing the modeller to duplicate elements that are identical in a certain aspect and thus should only be represented by one information object in the model. This goes against the very essence of BIM methodology for which GS claim to be forerunners. Ideally this should be covered by one feature with the users just having to define and keep track of which model state as elaborated on in A new approach to change and alternative designs. 

[rakurs]

While I do agree that copying elements from one design option / phase to the other is always going to be an issue, I feel like design options are... fine. However, if adjustiing design options / phases could be done the way you outline it, by CHANGING any property of the element (not just enabling / disabling for each design option / phase) it would be a game changer (pun intended.)

I mean, it would be wonderful if I could change one wall to, for example, lose (or gain) tiles on its finish by changing its composite from one phase to the other or from one design option to the other. I had a really small refurbishment project and it was a pain to slash walls into pieces, "demolish" them whole, and then add new walls which have a different composite as "new" walls. It is counterintuitive and, probably, messes up schedules. I didn't do them so I don't know that for a fact. Yeah, I could have made just the finishing as an entirely independent wall, but I cringe just at the thought of that.

[SeaGeoff]

Phasing is essential for so many project types and so many reasons. 

[Brandon-W_DWa]

Came to the Forums looking for a solution; found a Wishlist entry instead. Ideally this would be a rare occurrence, but upvote I must.

Unfortunately, we are faced with the same dilemma now. The most frustrating part, I think, is that I found a Forum post from 2013 - on Archicad 17 - with a similar question. It's wild to me that it's been over a decade, and there are still just workarounds to this problem, none of which are ideal. I'm about to tell the team that requested some assistance that they can either double (maybe even triple) the number of layers in their project, or spend extra time assigning elements to Design Options, or collage a mess of Views on all of their Layouts. They can pick their poison I guess?

Hopefully this gets some much needed attention soon.

[evr]

[Moderator: Merged from another topic to this existing Wish]

At the moment, Archicad supports three predefined renovation statuses: Existing, Demolition, and New.
This works well for simple projects, but it is too limited for multi-phase building projects where more than three construction stages need to be distinguished.

It would be a major improvement if users could add additional custom phases of construction (e.g. Phase 1, Phase 2, …).