Independent settings for individual parts/layers of walls or slabs

[bucha-michael]

Compared to Revit, Archicad has great sandwich composition or custom profile options. It works great for 3D design, but it doesn't work very well for BIM, where Revit is starting to have a stronger position due to the individual setting options for individual parts/layers of the construction.

In Archicad, I have a problem when I have one wall/slab, but I need to independently describe its individual parts with separate IFC properties, or just use independent reconstruction filter settings for individual parts. During renovations, the entire wall is usually not demolished, but the load-bearing part remains and only other layers are added or changed. Therefore, in Archicad I need to set independent properties and property sets for individual layers and to be able to change the reconstruction filter status for individual layers in the sandwich or custom profile settings.

When I export to IFC, it is already possible to divide the wall by materials and assign individual properties to individual materials, but only for material characteristic properties. I cannot use it for properties with different value for each wall/slab, because this properties settings is in material settings and not in wall/slab settings for individual layers. But I need to have different values for example in the properties like "Realisation Date" etc. for the thermal insulation on the walls in the 1st floor and in the 2nd floor, etc. Creating dozens of types of the same material is not a good solution and modeling separate walls for individual materials instead of using a sandwich or a custom profile is also not a solution.

[Lingwisyer]

https://graphisoft.com/product-roadmap/idea-pool

There is an item on the Roadmap called "Skin-By-Skin Design" which might include the IFC scope. Renovation is given as a use case in the description.

[bucha-michael]

Thank you for the information. So I hope this is something like what I was thinking. I wish it would be implemented soon.

[Tinou]

To my mind, and to reflect correctly the building process, walls should accept child/sub elements to model the interior or exterior insulation, claddings, finishes, etc. These elements have to be linked to the wall like a railing can be linked to a stair. Then the link can be manually deleted. Link will reproduce the openings of the main wall to the sub elements. (With some settings for reveals, etc.)

This way it may be possible to change the reno status of these parts with no consequence to the composites atributes. It also allows more combinations of composites without duplicate and modify hundreads of atributes. See here how just 10 composites can allow 50 combinations of walls with sub elements :

In this example, left is the wall before project and right is the wall after. The child/sub elements have different reno status. They reproduce the window opening.

[bucha-michael]

Your post is a description of what is actually possible, or a wish as to how the problem could be solved? I have tried to make a thermal insulation by railing tool, but the window is not respected... Then it doesn't matter if I create the new insulation by another wall or if I create it by a railing tool...

[Lingwisyer]

A wish. It is possible via Wall Accessories, but not in the core program.

[Tinou]

Yes, it's a wish. Current walls don't manage sub elements. Despite it, when it's needed, I sometimes make my model with some paralell walls, but I have to reproduce openings manually.

Wall accessories are realy to basic. The create objects that need to be updated. They don't refer to materials, composites, complex profiles.

A good software needs something better than workarounds with extras.

[Barry Kelly]

You can control wall skins in the vertical direction by creating complex profile wall with modifiers on each skin to adjust the heights.

In the horizontal direction you can split the wall and use different composites or complex profiles (but you can never stretch the lengths of individual skins).

Barry.

[bucha-michael]

It's clear to everyone that you can model almost anything in Archicad. Nobody's talking about modeling options... This topic is about the ability to assign separate classifications, attributes and IFC properties to each part of a wall/slab/etc... Its also about the ability to set the reconstruction status for individual parts of a structure in the sandwich construction settings or custom profile settings. I could easily draw a coordinate profile where I would have the load bearing part of the wall as existing construction, and (overlapping each other) another parts tagged as a demolition or new construction. Now I can only do this for the whole constructions, but not for parts of them, which is a problem because often in reconstruction the whole wall is not removed, but maybe just the old insulation or plaster.

[Erwin Edel]

We need to jump through hoops with exporting multiple IFC files and merging them to keep using composites for this reason.

A simple structural cavity wall (masonry) is very common in the Netherlands and you need to be able to set different classification for the outer masonry (non-structural), thermal insulation and structural core.

It's a long standing wish from our end of the archicad user base at least.

There are a lot of firms that cave to the demands of the contractor (often times also the real estate developer and your client these days) and start drafting only single material walls, ramping up the hours and risks for mistakes / inaccurate modelling. There really is a mismatch in the market between being able to model efficiently and being able to share a usable IFC model.