Nerve-racking ArchiCAD Issues on Views Orientation

Managing Views Orientation in ArchiCAD 24: Saved Views on the Layout

In a way, the extract below sums it all. If something is bound to go wrong, it is the one that will cause the most damage. There are some days, especially when approaching a deadline, that some drawings simply refuse to export correctly, causing delays which often result in distress and frustration. Such an occurrence happened to me recently and trust me, this can easily escalate from frustration to pure agony.

“If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.”Murphy's Law

After doing all the hard work and updating the drawings in the transmittal set, #publishing from #ArchiCAD should be the easiest, the most straightforward process for issuing a revised set of drawings. Don’t get me wrong, this usually is, but not this time.

For this project I’ve been working on, I had to publish both PDFs and DWGs. Using the same exact settings as for every job, some of the layout plans didn’t export right as DWGs. Having had some conversion issues in the past, I tend to check all the #DWG drawings I export from ArchiCAD by opening them with AutoCAD to avoid any complaints once the drawings get distributed.

The issue was that the DWGs plans were rotated on the #Layout in AutoCAD, although they were displaying correctly in the #ModelSpace. The frustrating side was that these plan drawings were at their third of fourth revision and have been previously exported as DWG with no issues whatsoever. Having had this issue for a couple of times before on some other projects, I found that not updating the view again on the layout in ArchiCAD after a Send & Receive operation in #Teamwork would sort out the issue relatively quickly, however, this didn’t work in this instance.

My approach to ArchiCAD views orientation

The View Settings I’ve always used for a plan drawing rotated on model space using ‘Set Orientation Graphically’, were as in the image below. This enabled me to work in ‘Ortho mode’ on a building following real North in ArchiCAD, as well as placing the plan drawings on the layout with no rotation.

Although this works in 99% times of the cases, the problematic 1% seems to work in a different way.

What seemed to solve my #rotation issue when opening the plan in AutoCAD was a fine tuning of the view settings in ArchiCAD. On the ArchiCAD Layout, right click to ‘Open Source View’ and set the ‘Zoomed Area’ to ‘Current Zoom’, then press OK, without modifying anything else. After updating the view on the layout, this exports perfectly fine as DWG and opens correctly in AutoCAD, solving my problems with ArchiCAD views orientation

Final thoughts

As I always say, this may not be the ultimate solution, but it is something that is worth trying. I discovered that not matter if I set up views ‘by the book’, ArchiCAD may decide to act recklessly.

If any of you ever faced something similar, I would be curious to know how you have managed to overcome this issue, so please leave your comments below or send your thoughts by DM.