Projects far from the Origin

It can happen that the Project must be located very far (i.e. some thousand kilometers) from the ArchiCAD-Origin, E.g. according to standards in certain countries. Although ArchiCAD is using Double Precision to calculate coordinate transformations, some algorithms using the epsilon value (very close to zero) may cause problems when used with big numbers, such as long distances or big coordinate values. Therefore you may experience loss of precision, malfunction, and in some cases loss of data while working too far from the absolute origin.

Whenever you experience such problems in existing files, try to first relocate the project to the absolute origin. If the problems disappear, then their cause was the huge distance of the project from the absolute origin.

In case you still need to work with huge coordinates the solution is to move the user origin away from the absolute origin instead of the whole project:
the endresult will be the same but with correct measurements, sections etc.
You can move the User Origin with holding down the Alt and Shift (Windows) or Opt and Shift (Mac) keys when placing a hotspot.

See how to relocate the project to the absolute origin for more details.

These are the possible problems/signs that occur when the absolute Origin is too far away:

• 170 000 m away from the origin:
  Polygon operations, such as moving holes inside the poligon may result in unexpected results.
• 1 000 000 m away from the origin:
  Some dimensioning text entities may disappear when printing.
• 6 600 000 m away from the origin:
  the Trim to Roof command is not effective in 3D & inaccuracies can appear in sections
• Max. coordinate values: 10^8 = 100 000 000 m

Page last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2004