Opening Archicad files

[D Wood]

I have been asked to take over a house alteration project which has been drawn in Archicad.

I can get the data via YouSendIt, and it comes as a collection of .dwg & .Shx files. On my iMac, the .dwg files show up as SolidWorks eDrawings, which is a program I have - should I try to import the .dwg directly into VW?

The name of each .dwg file seems to have a sheet number included (ie A03, A04) but some sheets have multiple files - A10 for instance has 4 files.

There seem to be 18 sheets (27 files), which seems a bit OTT for a simple house alteration, and will take forever if I have to import each one by one and adjust the scale each time.

Does anyone have experience of importing files like these?

Edited May 7, 2012 by D Wood

[VincentCuclair]

First you need to check if they are 2D or 3D dwgs. 3D dwgs don't contain any of the 2D info you might need.

When you choose Import>DWG/DXF you can choose several dwgs to import simultaneously. VWs imports all respective Sheets and Layers contained in the dwgs.

NEVER start working in VWs on a file that contains imported dwgs they are very prone to crashing and corruption.......first create a VWs file with all the imported dwg info then create new file in which you are going to work and import the VWs file with dwg info as an external reference through viewports. If you want to move certain info to avoid doing things twice you could copy paste between the files but again be very careful, a few weeks into the project and strange things could start to happen.....

.shx are font files...btw

Edited May 7, 2012 by Vincent C