ArchiCad terrain - export to 3D Studio Max

[Simen Liberg]

Hi,

We've got a small studio here in Oslo working with Arch Viz and we're trying to lay down the groundworks for a solid worflow/pipeline and I have a couple of questions I would really appreciate if any of you could help me answer.

Firstly, we've realized that there are a lot of architects here in Norway working in ArchiCad. When a scene/model is exported from ArchiCad to a format that 3D studio max can merge (3ds/obj) the model of the building looks fine and the mesh is fairly tidy. However it's a completely different story when it comes to the terrain. The mesh is very messy and there are loads of knots where edges meet and large areas with non-tri/quad faces making the model quite useless (as far as I can see, anyway) in Max. So, my question is, are there any clever ways of exporting a terrain from ArchiCad to either a more detailed and uniform mesh or a topography-image (black and white image that I can use as a displacement map in Max)?

Hope there's someone who can help me with this!


Simen

[knurre busk]

I´m a fellow Norwegian, and love Archicad even if I ended up with Revit.
Perhaps you can clean it up with the same script as I use for Revit fbx files!

It all depends if it´s a nice mesh from the start, bad site work can never be fixed.

Since I´m not a frequent poster on this board direct links are not allowed, but do a search for Pierre-Felix Breton, and you will find.

I´ll warn you to be prepared for lots of Revit in the future, and combined with Civil 3d terrain.

[Miguel Lescano]

Hi, I used ArchiCAD for years and I know what you mean. if you use SketchUp, there's a free "terrain reshaper" plugin for SketchUp that does exactly that. Look for it in the extensions index of SketchUcation. I can't give you the link because this is my first post here and the forum won't accept links from me.