Archicad and blender workflow

Hi there!

I’m trying to figure how to make this two software work together in a smooth way. The idea is to introduce into my office of architecture new rendering solutions and cycles seems to fix perfectly (well it probably needs lots of improvement before getting to the same level as other rendering engines). Anyway, right now we model all in archicad and then we export it into artlantis, the good thing about artlantis is that it lets you save all your scene configuration (materials, lights etc) giving you the chance to have someone modeling and someone else rendering, similar to “filelink manager” from autodesk, that way you import your model and all materials are already applyed. My question is: can it be done with blender? and if yes how would it be?

Oh! one more thing, how can i create my own material library in cycles? i have lots of textures and its kind of boring to apply them to a material for every projects. A library with material preview would be handy…

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

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As far as I am familiar with Blender, its modeling capabilities are endless. As for rendering, it has a good render and you can adjust many things in it and play around with it. The scene (materials, lamps, objects etc) will all be saved in to a .blend file and thus allowing the other person to work on it as well. The only thing about materials and textures is that you need to pack them into the .blend file before giving it to someone else because it doesn’t do so automatically.

I hope that helps.

If the textures lie on a network accessible location in an office environment that everyone has access to then do they still need packing. :wink:

Blender has a good asset linking system, like AutoCad’s XREF but far better and fine grained, the sort of thing AutoCAD should have had 10 years ago :slight_smile: linking just a material, an object etc from blend file to blend file, sorry don’t know what ArchiCAD’s equivalent, is long time since I used that.

I’d guess if you’re going to export the model from ArchiCAD into Blender before texturing etc then I’d start with something like .obj, may be prudent to export the bigger models in some sort of hierarchy, by storey or building element, using a common point and import to individual blend files to start with, clean them up and then import them all together into one blend file, again long time since I tried ArchiCAD -> Blender.

But expect quite a lot of work.