New add-on for Archicad® bridges gap between 2D drawings and the Virtual Building™ model
Budapest, March 12, 2002 – Graphisoft, developer of the Virtual Building concept, today announced the release of Plan2Model®, a new software that dramatically increases efficiency in the conversion of traditional 2D CAD drawings into the intelligent model of Archicad.
Plan2Model provides architects the power to turn their 2D floor plans into 3D Archicad models quickly and efficiently. It converts “dumb” vector entities – lines, arcs and circles – into an intelligent building model of Archicad containing walls, columns, windows, doors, beams and other building components. Automatic or semi-automatic conversion modes give the architect total control over the process.
“Worldwide a growing number of architects are switching from traditional two-dimensional CAD programs into Archicad in order to benefit from its easy-to-use modeling environment.” said Bence Kovacs, Director of Product Marketing. “The one-click conversion eliminates the lengthy process of manual data entry and as a result, users can expect up to 40% time saving. The migration from two-dimensional CAD will be effortless as users can easily utilize their existing data in Archicad’s Virtual Building environment.”
Archicad users will also benefit from Plan2Model in a wide range of situations such as refurbishment projects based on existing 2D plans, interpreting sketches for design development or cooperating with users of two-dimensional CAD. Furthermore, companies using Graphisoft’s ArchiFM facility management solution will find Plan2Model essential as it eliminates the bottleneck of initial data input.
The product has been created in the partnership between Graphisoft and Consistent Software. It benefits from Consistent Software’s 10 years of know-how in the field of pattern recognition algorithms. Plan2Model supports DXF and DWG and other 2D CAD files, as well as imported sketches and drawings processed by raster-to-vector conversion software. Plan2Model is available for Archicad 7.0’s Windows version in English and German (to be followed by further language versions in near future).