Bring OSM context to Archicad

Quite often we need to populate the surroundings for our BIM projects. Some programs such as Twinmotion have the native ability to crop a portion of a city and generate 3D buildings. But what if your BIM software lacks this ability. Archicad is such a BIM environment. Luckily there is the live connection with Grasshopper, which means all the Grasshopper potential can be harnessed by Archicad. Below is the video guide on how to do it.

City contexts can be exported from OpenStreetMap and the resulting .osm files can be read by Grasshopper. You may need some third-party plug-in such as Elk to read its contents. The osm contents are used to recreate building polylines. Then a series of elevation data can be populated inside Grasshopper that will serve as height values for walls in BIM. Similar workflow can be also used for other BIM environments such as Revit.