I’m an independent Software Engineer and Mathematician. My main focus is on developing Add-Ons for Archicad. I develop custom software for clients as well as software which I offer on this site.

Clients

How to Schedule Wall Finishes per Room

There is no out of the box example in Archicad for a wall finish schedule per room. You often end up manually entering materials in the zone stamp or otherwise duplicating the information you already have represented in the boundary walls. Shouldn’t that information come directly out of the model? And managing several different covering materials per room is a nightmare. Then you keep getting frustrated when trying to make the process fully automated. [Read More]

How to Use Automatic Zones When There's no Continuous Boundary

The automatic zone finding tool in Archicad (Geometry Method: Inner Edge / Reference Edge) is the preferred way to create zones for most users I know. You can quickly update your zone geometry (Design -> Update Zones…) if you move the boundary walls. But what do you do if the room you’d like to indicate is not bounded continuously? For example in my plan the rooms Hallway and Living/Kitchen should certainly be considered two different zones although there’s no door between them. [Read More]

How to Use the Wand Tool for Wall Coverings

If you decide to draw separate walls for your wall coverings, you might wonder how to draft these efficiently. Of course you can trace the outline of the “naked” walls manually, but this feels like you are back in AutoCAD again. And then there’s still the problem of needing empty door and window holes in the new finishes. Do you really have to setup each of them manually?

[Read More]

How to Setup a Profile Modifier for Finish Heights

One way to create flexible finishes for walls is to use complex profiles with modifiers. Variable finish heights and thickness are both possible but setting up the profile modifiers in Archicad can be daunting at first. And maybe you’ve been burnt before by such modifiers with inexplicable behavior. There are 4 different types of offset modifiers and it’s important to catch the correct type. It took me a few tries to get it right even for the easy case of flexible finish heights, so here’s a detailed step-by-step guide for you and past me ;)

[Read More]

Ortho Tool

Align and orthogonalize walls and beams to the current view angle if they are within a given tolerance.

[Read More]

Room Coverings

Automatically create coverings modeled as native Archicad walls.

[Read More]

MVO Properties Label

To display different properties via labels depending on the view you could place labels on separate layers and hide/show these layers per view. What if instead you could only place one label and control the property displayed via the Model View Options? This is was the basic idea raised independently by users Nuge and Pablo Ferrer on the Archicad Users Discord. I was curious how this might work out, so I’ve created a test object to try out the idea. [Read More]

How to Get Room Areas With and Without Plaster Reduction Using the Room-Coverings Add-On

There is no easy, out of the box way to get zone areas both with and without plaster area in Archicad. You could achieve it by modeling the plaster walls as separate simple walls and setting them up to reduce the room area. But to model all plaster manually instead of using composite materials is horrible! With the Room Coverings Add-On you can automate a big chunk of that modeling work. In this post I’ll demonstrate how to use the Add-On to model the separate plaster walls automatically and how to get the room area with and without the subtraction of the plaster area.

[Read More]