Archipack For Blender

[Dardo Hameed]

Usea 1:1000 like representation, (simple walls without complicated details) best suited for 2d to 3d, while archipack is able to handle pretty complex and poorly designed blueprints - not properly closed entities / duplicated lines and so on, it will be faster.

Hey @stephen_leger , I used to select vertices as shown below and move them with G shortcut but after the latest updates I can no longer do this (Whole object moves). Did you change the behaviour of this feature or is it a bug?

Is your addon working in blender 4? a friend of mine got the pro version and said it wouldnt install in blender 4 and would give python error when he tried to activate it in addons section so it wouldnt activate. Is this the case? if so when will a working version for blender 4 be available? If its supposed to work what can cause this so i can address it if i buy the pro addon.

I make a square with walls for a house, put in some windows.

Then I make another square wall as an extension of the house and put in some windows.

I now have two different squares with two different walls.

If I use the tool Auto boolean on any of the two walls, the other wall will have its window holes shut and have it windows in the wall.

A little disclaimer, since Archipack's original intent was for visualisation, not architectural drafting, but I thought I'd give it a spin, since I assume that's the goal - for Archipack to be the best architectural modeling tool in Blender. I had been doing more bespoke buildings and never took the time to try out Archipack in detail to see if it could replace the type of larger commercial drafting I was used to. Here are my observations. Some are similar to bugreports, some need further fleshing out. I hope this can help polish Archipack!

I did not notice shortcuts to create walls, doors, etc. We need shortcuts when we draw! Also, to create a wall / door/ etc takes two clicks. The first click to click the wall button, and a second click, a significant distance apart from the first click, to click the desired wall type. This should be reduced to one click (and therefore one keyboard shortcut). This may sound like a small issue, but I guarantee it is not for a seasoned drafter!

Also, when I click the wall tool, an X and Y axis appears on my screen where my cursor last was... but when I move my cursor, the XY axis intersection doesn't follow my mouse. Is this a bug? See screenshot below where I've circled the XY intersection.

Out of the box, there is an "Inside 10x240", "Inside 15x240" and "Outside 30x240". Wall presets. Putting on my architecture hat, there are a few things concerning me. There are two usecases I'm looking for:

So the presets are nice as a demonstration, but not practical for the concept stage. 2400mm is not a typical floor to floor height, so is too short. The use of the words "Inside" and "Outside" are misleading, as you may indeed have outdoor walls being 150mm (e.g. shopfront glazing) and indeed have indoor walls being 300mm (e.g. to capture structural columns). Typically during generic planning, you look for 3 or 4 generic sizes depending on the topology: like 50mm (toilet partitioning), 100mm or 150mm (indoor non-structural partitions), 200mm or 250mm (inter-tenancy walls, block walls, particular fire rated or acoustic treated walls), and 300mm or 350mm walls (structural walls). Can I recommend adding generic walls, perhaps at 100,150,200,250,300 sizes?

Once concept stage is done, for larger projects (note: less of an issue for smaller projects), it is important to bulk select and manage walls of a particular construction type. So if I click a wall, I should see very prominently what type of wall it is: a Generic 150mm wall, Generic 250mm wall, etc. I did not see this function. In the IFC world, this links to a "IfcWallType" relationship. Therefore, if I then change a property of a single Generic 150mm wall, then all other Generic 150mm walls should also inherit that property.

In short, clicking wall should prominently display whether or not it is a single bespoke wall, or if it is part of a wall type, and what that wall type is. Ideally, if the BlenderBIM Add-on is installed, then it should show the wall type IFC relationship too.

Similarly, it is important to note to relationship to door and wall. This is important as it determines how you schedule the door opening. In the first picture, I drew the frame overlapping the (supposedly partition) wall. In the picture below, however, you can see it does not overlap (also for stud wall):

In concrete block walls, very common in commercial designs, steel door frames may be face fixed as shown below. Note that if it is face fixed, there needs to be a parameter to determine how far inset it is in the wall opening.

In terms of the relationship between walls and doors (or windows, structures, ceilings and floors, and so on) I'm always put down by the standard or inflexible way software forces our modelling. I like to customize my own details and that's the kind of flexibility I find in my current software, SketchUp. It's one of the things that makes suspicious of BIM modelling. Is there some BIM software example where architects can define or parametrize in detail how a door intersects with a wall and then apply that to all doors of the same type? And if so does a type have to change if the wall it's inserted into changes (For instance from a concrete wall to a multilayered wall type)?

My observations are more at the workflow level and not as granular as stuff you've addressed. Archipack is indeed fast as advertised for architectural modeling and concept development and the amount of thought that has gone into it shines through, the more you get to discover it's nuances. I had a few gotchas though that slowed me down. Some time spent reading the backlog of comments of the Blender Artists thread for Archipack sorted some of the issues out, while Stephen was kind enough with answers to others. Given that everyone would be coming from workflows and practices they are accustomed to with other tools, I think it would help to have a repository of tips for using Archipack. Here is a spread sheet for example, which I started to archive lessons learnt from my own experience and from feedback from Stephen, though these may change as Archipack gets developed further.

I lost a lot of time getting svg exporting to work right. I'm aware the entire 3d to 2d workflow is being worked on, but my experience coordinating with other people who don't use Blender is that a lot is hinged on the 3d to 2d workflow being seamless. I would typically export to SVG, edit the svg in Inkscpape for proper communication and then send the output from Inkscape out for feedback. When the feedback comes and I return to work on the model in Blender, all the time spent editing in Inkscape would be lost as I would have to repeat the same steps over again. It adds up to a lot of time, especially if you have to go back and forth a few times and I got complaints about time lost due to this workflow. I'm really wondering if Grease Pencil can be hacked to replace the 2d line work that would have been done in Inkscape, so the workflow becomes that you generate a 2d plan same as you would a section, add a Grease Pencil layer on top for more line work, sketches and annotations, export all that together to svg for feedback, receive feedback, implement changes on the Blender model, press update plan to update the 2d plan, edit the Grease Pencil layer you set up on the first pass and export to svg for another round of feedback.

Lastly, I had quite a setback with walls not being straight and had to re-draft all the walls in AutoCAD. Perhaps I could have done a better job of constraining my walls while modelling in Blender (toggling F8 in AutoCAD does this effortlessly), but I assumed they were straight while most of them were off when imported to AutoCAD. The redrafting cost a lot of time.

I've seen drafting can be done in Blender, I do limited drafting using curves, and the CAD Transform tools and other tools make this more precise, critical gaps in the workflow however need to be plugged- lineweight, linestyle, layers, (Grease Pencil has these), etc.

@JQL just a note that you don't need to use Archipack if you don't want to. In Blender, just like SketchUp, any shape can be any BIM object, and we've designed BIM data (BlenderBIM Add-on) and geometry generation (Archipack) to be separate, so this allows us to either manually draw with 100% control, or use any tool we need to get the parametric behaviour we're looking for. Archipack is one of the options, which I describe in this thread :)

I mocked up what I think the "add wall" wall type selection window should look like by default. Note that these are for metric standards, and I purposely omitted the wonderful world of partition walls and only provided a single sample. If Blender is set to imperial units, it should probably default to imperial standards (e.g. a 4x2" stud wall), but for metric, I believe what I've put in the image below are safely generic to be used as a starting point for architects. I think it is relatively easy to do and will add a lot of value. @stephen_l just a note: if I put there brick/block wall, or stud wall, I actually do not expect Archipack to generate each individual brick or stud. In fact, I want it not to do that by default. It should simply set the materials and overall size correctly. So all the functions to create it already exist, I'm just proposing to add it to the presets.

Later on, there can be additional tools to generic studwork or count blocks / bricks (calculating cut bricks and rationalising to brick dimensions is important when designing), but it is not necessary when supplying these presets out of the box for now.

If you want to build a feature that has country presets, that would be ideal and we can provide more "correct" presets, but until then... hopefully these presets get you more "in the ballpark" for architectural users.

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