ArchiCAD to EIAS

[mishmish]

Hi Everyone,

 

I don't know how many of you are still out there who using ArchiCAD conjunction with Electric Image but some improvments have been done in 9.1

As you know ArchiCAD is using a really old export format (2.9) which is still working and was almost sent to death. This export is very acient and I always had to use Transporter to recalculate normals etc.

Version 9.0 just imported the FACT but had no option to do some adjustments - like smoothing angle which ArchiCAD use for low resolution smooth surfaces: for instance topographic meshes and spheres. as you are able to do with OBJ files. As a partial solution I used OBJ export but that damaged the layer structures what I could get from ArchiCAD through the FACT export. I asked the EIAS guys to fix this and here it is:

9.1 solves this issue. As Tomas instructed me you have to do following.

Add the FACT file to a new project as you normally do. Select the FACT file in the Layers Window, go to Object>Export Object>Validate FACT

This will bring up the nice setup window which OBJ or 3DS would normally have. I set the smoothing angle to 60 or 66 and that would do the job. It will also fix the normal vectors which I think has been really bad before from ArchiCAD - looks like out from ArchiCAD 16 it's not bad, but never know.

 

One more tip: I usually use 1mm as an export unit. if you use 1000mm EIAS will not like that for some reason. But 1mm will work fine; you just have to assume the real world unit numbers in EIAS as meters.

 

For future features I'm hoping for easy to use vegetation and distribution of it (ONYX trees or similar) combined with particle engine so I can spread out the trees using maybe the strength map paint on a mesh surface and/or follow a bazier path to distribute trees/object.

 

Best

MishMish

 

[Tomas Egger]

Ola MishMish!

 

Welcome and Excellent tip! Great its allowing your company to improve the EIAS workflow :)

 

Thanks

 

Tom