Back in 2015 Trimble (owners of Sefaira) and the Nemetschek Group (owners of ARCHICAD) “formed a strategic alliance that will increase interoperability among their products.” Now three years later I do not see much evidence of that interoperability. Case in point is the lack of a Sefaira plug-in for ARCHICAD. I know of some high profile ARCHICAD firms that use Sefaira by going through SketchUp, but that is clunky and inefficient. I think a lot more ARCHICAD users would use Sefaira if a plug-in was available, especially those in North America. I hope you will consider providing this. Thanks.
Thank you for your comment and question. Apologies for the slow response.
As I’m sure you can imagine, a lot of work goes into making a geometry conversion plugin for Sefaira. The architectural geometry needs to be converted into both EnergyPlus and Radiance geometry and for BIM products like ARCHICAD, we need to also infer what the most typical attribution workflows are for users of that product and then use that to try and anticipate the best ways to convert or discard origin materials.
In short - because it’s not insignificant as a piece of work, since becoming part of Trimble we have instead focussed on improving our processes for importing Revit and SketchUp. Over the past two years we’ve made substantial structural improvements to the processes used to convert models. Our focus for now is to make conversion from these platforms as robust and accurate as we can.
It would be great to know more about the troubles you have converting from ArchiCAD to SketchUp. One pathway might be for us to do that conversion better for you and that sounds like an area where we should also improve anyway. Perhaps we can talk more about this offline over the phone?
Thanks for your reply. I had forgotten that I posted on this subject.
Generally we do not entertain workflows that involve intermediary software but we have had success using SketchUp as a go-between in our VR export from ARCHICAD so I would consider testing this method. It sounds like some improvements have been made.
Feel free to contact me to discuss further. Thanks.