How to Import AutoCAD Details to ArchiCAD

Foreign.

Welcome to another episode of Design Under Influence where I, Alex, who works for Ark IT and committed to help support architecture engineering design companies with their it.

And he, Willard Williams, a friend and also an expert in architect and an expert in archicad and everything related to it.

Going to take you on a journey today, Willard.

Are you feeling up to it?

I am feeling more than up to it.

Thanks for having me today, Alex.

That's a happy Willard.

All right, so the topic today, importing details from AutoCAD to Archicad, you and I talked about and said, what's the biggest roadblock for folks going from 2D, whatever, to BIM and specifically Archicad?

And we discussed it and you said, the first thing you said is like, hey, it's importing details, it's importing projects.

And so, you know, we prepared a show and tell for you today.

Right?

Will it?

Yep.

And you, you say that's the biggest sort of roadblock in your opinion, or is one of the biggest?

Well, I was thinking back to both times in my career where I have been stuck in the idea that I was faster in AutoCAD or that I needed to work in AutoCAD.

And then throughout kind of my kind of evolution of my career, helping others and seeing what they were most uncomfortable with.

And it, in my opinion, it seemed like it was getting all of their assets or their details or the information that they have spent, you know, years creating into another application was what I thought was more the.

One of the larger pain points that I see.

All right, let's hit the pain point.

Let's spread some salve onto the wound.

How's that?

Yeah, let's do it.

So go ahead and share your screen, please, and walk us through this, this process.

Okay, so we're looking at one thing, but I'm going to start from kind of the beginning.

So this is a.

A totally new file, and this was just created from a blank archicad file.

But what I did is this is kind of prep.

So what I'm going to do is I am actually, I'm going to try to do this live, but I'm going to do a new version of archicad and I'm just going to launch a new instance just in case I need to go back to this version.

And so this, it's going to just take a second.

We opened a new instance of Archicad28, and this is a blank file.

What I am going to do is I'm going to go over here.

This window here is the Navigator you should have this on the sidebar.

I'm going to just put this back so you can get it back there.

In this navigator we have when you highlight over, you have the project map and then you have the view map and then you have the layout book and then finally you have the publisher set.

And so what I am going to do is I am going to scroll down here and I'm going to go to this little area called Details, which is between the worksheet and then the 3D document.

I'm just going to right click on here and I'm going to say new independent detail.

So you can do it that way or you can actually just push this plus button.

But I just right clicked and say new independent detail.

And you want to name this like something that makes sense.

So I know that I'm bringing in a certain file and just to be certain what I'm bringing in, maybe I need to check before I jump into opening or naming this.

And so I'm going to open this up and in this I have a file here that I'm going to bring in.

It's called Irrigate.

So it's the irrigation information.

And so I'll just name this irrigation and then I'll just give it a number.

For now we'll just say it's the 101 series and I'll just name this IR01 just to indicate that that's the reference ID.

So I'm going to create this independent sheet and what this is.

So if you're not super familiar with archicad or parametric modeling, what this, this detail represents is a two dimensional plane that we can work on.

So this would be the closest thing that you coming from AutoCAD or kind of a, a more kind of two dimensional drawing platform or have two dimensional drawings that you're importing.

This would be the most, the closest thing that you would be most familiar with.

But if we go back over to our project map, we can see we have stories, we have sections and this is kind of in the, the stock template that comes out of archicad.

But these here are kind of the three dimensional information, two dimensional information or looking at like three dimensional information.

But the worksheet and the details are actually just two dimensional information and so you can't actually make three dimensional information in this area.

So I know that gets a little bit complicated and this is not really the direction that we're taking for this kind of quick demonstration, but I just wanted to give you kind of a brief overview that There's a bunch of different ways that you could look at information, but this details and worksheets is a little bit disconnected.

But just as a caveat, you can take three dimensional information or parametric information and extract that and put them into details that are connected to that information and can be updated.

But for purposes of what we're doing, we're just looking at a sheet of information and we're going to be just dealing with that.

So I have this blank sheet here and you can see here there's just like this origin point.

And this might look just a little bit different in my layout because I've altered some of these palettes to look the way that I'm most comfortable with.

But generally this is what you'd be getting out of the box.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up this location where I have these details and I'm going to bring it in.

So I know that I want to bring this in, so I'm just going to bring it over.

And what it's telling me here is that I have it open in another application.

And so in AutoCAD, I have the details kind of lined out and we can see what I'm looking at.

So I'm just going to close these because we do not want them open when I'm bringing them in.

So I'm going to just close those for now and then I'm going to retry and it's asking me what scale.

And typically it's going to be 1 to 1 or 1 inch to 1 inch.

And.

But there's other ways that that information can be scaled prior to you bringing it in.

And you just want to know how it was exported.

But I'm going to place that and then it's asking me that there's some reference information that is missing.

I don't really care about that right now.

And then if there are.

So it's looking for a.

It's looking for a font type.

And so I don't have that.

I'm not really worried about that.

If I was, I could potentially replace that font or find that font.

And so I'm just going to skip all for now.

And then it should bring it in and there we go.

And just for example sakes, I'm going to open that back up again just so that you can see.

So we're looking at this.

And then if I go back to my other sheet here, it's the same drawing, but what you'll notice is that this is A sheet of information.

Even though it's a sheet, I can.

When my little mouse comes over and turns into a check mark, it finds the corner or the edge.

And so I know that there's data behind this one piece.

And what I can do is I can right click on the drawing and I can say explode into current view.

This is one of my favorite operations because it allows me to take data that was created somewhere else and explode it into my drawings.

But what I'm going to do here is keep the original elements after exploding.

So I'm going to explode that and boom.

We now have escape once.

And now I have a text block here.

And if I click into that, I can modify that and what you're seeing and I'm just going to move that back.

But what you're also seeing is that I didn't delete the original file and so that file remained.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this on a different layer for now.

So I'm going to go up here and I can go down here and put it on a layer or I can look at the settings by going either right clicking on it and saying go to drawing selection settings.

Or that's Control T and.

Or that would be Apple T if using a Mac.

So I go up here and I just need to hide.

Okay, so I go up here and I'm looking at my drawing selection settings and I can also change the layer down here.

And what I want to do before I do that is I would like to actually put this on a different layer.

So I'm going to just push Control L for now and I'm going into my layer settings and I am going to create a new layer and I'm going to call this arcit.

How about dwg?

And if I put a period and I put arc it at the end, it will automatically put into this extensions and I'm going to just say, okay.

And what I've done is created a layer.

But what I want to do is I want to put this information onto a layer and the reason I want do that, so I'm going to do it the short way.

And so our archicad has a really cool feature that I absolutely adore is I can type into my layers and I can isolate my layers by name.

This is a fairly new feature and it's really helpful.

And so I'm going to just change that to this DWG and the extensions arcit and now this drawing, the original is on that layer.

So what I want to do is I actually want to hide that.

So I'm going to hide it by hiding with my little Quick Layer palette.

And you might not have this available, so I'm just going to show you where that is really quickly.

So if I go to palettes and then if I go down to Quick Layers, and that is the Quick Layers, which is this.

And so now I have this little palette, I'm just going to hide this.

And what I.

Why I did that is I want to keep it there as a reference, because I want to make sure that the information that I'm manipulating is accurate and reflects the original content that I brought in.

So now I have this file in here.

I'm going to do one other thing.

So I have this big sheet of drawings or details, and this is not necessarily how I want to see my details inside of archicad or anywhere else until I publish them.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a very quick way to get these details into individual areas.

So I have.

Let's see here, we have nine details, and right now we're at a quarter inch.

These are probably, I would say at least inch and a half.

But we're going to just leave them at quarter inch because there's something else that we would have to do once we start to mess with that scale.

But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this, I'm going to copy it, and I'm going to leave this Irrigation 101, and maybe I will put an R before this as a reference.

And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new detail.

And let's say.

What is this?

This is like a.

An area drain, it looks like.

Let's just do.

Let's just make it irrigation.

Let's just call it area drain.

And then it'll be.

We'll make it irrigation reference detail, too.

So I'm going to create a new detail and put that there.

And now again, we're back into kind of a new workspace.

And up here we can see that we've created that drawing.

I still have my copy command filled with that old detail, and I'm going to paste it.

So that's one.

I'm going to go back to the original drawing, which I am, and then I'm going to copy this one, and I'm just going to copy it and I'm going to make a new detail and we'll call this.

What is that?

Looks like a valve box.

Yeah.

So we'll just say valve box and I'm going to paste that.

Bam.

We got a new detail.

Now, I'm not going to do with this with everything, but again, you know, you're just, you know, getting used to kind of this new environment.

So you can go through, you can do lots of different details that way.

And one other way that I've done these details.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back for a second and so I'm going to click this back button.

And so now I have my drawing that was the original drawing back there.

What I sometimes do is instead of like creating a bunch of sheets or details that have these sheets on them, I'll create one and it has every single detail that I want to manipulate or mess with and I'll bring all of those into one area and then copy them individually out to another location.

And so what this really shows is two things.

Let's go back to the first detail that we created is fairly quickly, you can bring in native AutoCAD information into your Archicad environment fairly easily.

And I think what we're going to do in one of the next episodes is talk about how we get this information onto sheets and then potentially how we start to manipulate this.

So I feel fairly confident that, like, once I bring this detail in, that I have a really good starting point.

And one of the things, it depends on the version of the application that you're bringing in, but one thing that I do find is that these, like text boxes sometimes are a little bit not super intelligent as you would consider what is in archicad.

And so that can be a little bit daunting just because what I would do is I would take this information.

Let's see how I would do this.

I would potentially do it this way.

So I would.

Whoops.

So I would take this data and I'm just going to copy this inside of this, this text box and then I'm going to get a leader or a label tool and I'm going to take the same information and I'm going to start to replicate it the way that I would like to see it.

And I'm just going to put that same information in there.

And now I am also going to do another thing because I know this detail is probably a different scale than this.

It's probably not inch and a half.

It might be like half inch.

Yeah, that's probably pretty close.

And then I'm going to manipulate this a Little bit.

Oops, trying to touch the edge here.

And I'm going to make the text like nine point, which is typical.

And then I'm going to bring this out and so it actually might be an inch and a half detail.

And then I'm also going to adjust.

And so I'm just scrolling in this top bar here and I'm going to take the width off of here so it's zero.

And I'm going to take this, the head, which is that arrow, and I'm going to make that like four.

And I'm probably, I don't know, it depends on how I want to do this, but sometimes I like to use the circle and I'm just going to kind of manipulate that.

But for all intents and purposes, what I would really have to do is I would look at this and I'm going to go to the settings now.

And this is just because I used a brand new file without like my template or you know, like the company's template or whoever I'm trying to do this work for.

But anyway, I'm going to go to the settings.

So just control T.

And if I was satisfied with all these manipulations that I was making to this object, I could favorite it.

And so I would just add this as a favorite and I would just call this like detail label and that would be my detail label that I create.

But what I'm also trying to do here is, so I'm going to change this to inch and a half, so that is starting to look right.

And then I'm going to also add this other information because this was part of it.

So I might need to get closer.

So I'm double clicking in there.

And one other thing that I sometimes do when I'm doing this is instead of copying it, I will cut.

And what that does is it doesn't leave an object in there anymore.

So there's nothing left because it's a null.

And I'll just put that into here.

And you can see that I'm going to have to fight with this a little bit just because the size of everything is different.

But as I start to go through this now I have a detail that, other than this piece here, let's just select that, delete it.

Now this is more of a parametric object that I'm used to and comfortable with.

But again, this is not necessarily critical to what I'm trying to achieve here.

But in the long run it will be because I'll be able to manipulate this information.

I'll be able to adjust, you know, the edges and, you know, start to fill that out and then kind of lastly, kind of what.

And the reason why I thought this was a good topic to start off with is because long, long time ago I was helping an architect with a project and I was using AutoCAD because I was like, you know, this was a really long time ago.

I hadn't started using archicad, but I did have a license of archicad.

And the reason I had gotten the license of archicad was to work with this architect.

But in one of the jobs I was doing was going through and converting and updating details from, or really updating details and then adding them to a project.

And what I found was I was using AutoCAD to manipulate these details.

And he told me, he was like, why are you still using AutoCAD?

And I said, well, I'm just faster than that.

And he's like, you can do anything that you can do in AutoCAD in Archicad.

And I was like, thought about that for a second and then I started to realize like, if I wanted to actually draw this or manipulate it, I could do that in archicad just as fast, if not faster.

And so I'm going to show you.

So let's just see if we can manipulate something quickly in this.

I'm going to change two things.

I'm going to change the size of this pipe and maybe I'll extend this here and then change the background a little bit.

So I am going to do two things.

So I'm going to take my marquee tool and I'm going to just select everything.

Let's just go below that line there.

And what the marquee tool allows me to do is manipulate information as a group.

And so and I'm just going to push the M button and I'm going to measure this real quick to see how.

So that's like a 2 inch diameter pipe.

I'm going to make this a 4 inch.

So I'm just going to drag this down and what I'm doing with my fingers is I'm pushing the shift button and then I'm going to push R and that locks kind of the direction as well as allows me to input a distance or a length.

And I'm going to put two and backslash, which is inches.

And if I push tab, that shows that that Little Mark is 2 inches and I'm going at a straight line.

So now I've just dragged that down and now this has become, I'm just approximating, you know, now it's roughly a 4 inch pipe.

So that's good.

And what I'm also going to do is I'm going to change this to a different gravel.

And so these are the, the fills that have were brought in and I am going to look for something different that is more native.

And so I'm going to use this.

I just typed gravel and then the stone gravel comes up.

So I'm going to select that and I just changed that.

So now that is a native fill that comes through from Archicad.

And I'm just going to do one other thing and I'm going to add like a little border here.

And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my alt or command button and I'm going to push that and it gives me this little magic wand and that magic or sorry, the eyedropper.

So I'm going to absorb the properties of that.

And when you absorb the properties, you can see like up here, like if I absorb this, it absorbs here and it shows like here or here.

And so I'm going to absorb this one.

Now I have that gravel, excuse me, and I'm going to add 2 inches of gravel maybe to the edge here.

So if I go up to here, I'm just going to add the 2 inches and the 6 inches is fine.

And so now I've added gravel to the edge there and it's overlapping.

So I'm just going to use my command or I'm actually just going to cut the edge off of this.

So I use the shortcut command control F for fracture.

And then I'm cutting that off and now I have that edge situation.

And just to kind of clean up this condition here, I'm going to do one last thing.

So I just selected the edge of this new fill here and I'm going to push this add button and I'm going to select this and push the space button.

And this is like the magic wand.

And now I've filled this entire cavity here with one fill and I'm going to take the old one and I'm just going to delete it.

And I'm going to delete this little line and some other line looks like and another line.

And so now I'm creating more of a uniform condition.

But I can also just.

Because the likelihood of somebody kind of doing this all at once is probably not super high.

So maybe, maybe I'll just cut this again right here.

And so that's kind of A demonstration of how easy it is to kind of manipulate like the line work.

And again, I can just use my absorb observed it and now I can recreate a new line that has the same properties and has the same weight and I can add other information inside of this drawing that I brought in.

So just a quick recap of what we achieved or are trying to achieve is that initially we brought in this DWG that contains some details.

We're using those details to start to populate our archicad file so that we can either reference these details, details inside of our file or put these onto sheets inside of our actual project.

We started to manipulate some of the text and leader or labels so that they would be more native objects.

Not a huge deal, but it does come into play when you start to place this information onto sheets.

Because text sometimes can be a little bit cumbersome because you know, this text looks right but the scale down here is not necessarily accurate or it's not going to show up correctly on a sheet or it's going to be too small on a sheet.

So this is just like something that I do throughout all the things that I've worked on is I find it's easier for me to manipulate this information and then also let me go back to that scale and then we can start to manipulate the actual information, do some edits and stuff like that pretty easily and pretty quickly.

And once we start to kind of bring these details in, we're not having to necessarily reinvent the wheel per se.

And if we did want to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch, we again could use this information as a sketch.

So I'm going to just.

And I'm kind of going long winded here.

I'm going to show you one other thing that I could do is I've created a new blank detail and I am going to take this master detail sheet layout and I'm going to show it as a trace reference and I can manipulate this trace reference information to look the way that I want.

I can also dim it or do that and then I could, if I didn't want to alter, if I didn't want to just bring in the information and I wanted to use this as a reference and create it from scratch.

I could just go over this and trace it and I could start to manipulate.

I'm just going to do a quick version of this, but I'm able to snap to everything and you know, if this was, we could change this to earth and then if I take that trace off, then I'm starting to create a trace reference of this information here, but in any event, this is just a very quick and dirty way to show that you can bring in native AutoCAD or other information into your ArchiCAD file to get a jumpstart and you won't have to worry about losing all that hard work that you put into all these details.

So with that said, I'm going to stop sharing.

Very nice, Willard.

Great demo.

Thank you for doing that folks.

If you got questions, issues, concerns, problems, need help, check us out@getarchite.com we can help you with your IT.

We can also help you with moving to a new bim tools like archicad and hopefully this was helpful for you and wish you all the best Willard.

Thank you for your time and all your wisdom.

Yeah, we'll see you guys in the next one.

We're going to get deeper into now that we have the details imported and set up in archicad, what's the next step?

And that's what we're going to cover next.

Excellent.