Align View

When using a scanned photograph as the background of your rendering, you may want to fit your ARCHICAD model into the photograph’s environment. In the photorendering made from the Camera placed by the Document > Creative Imaging > Align View command, the perspective of your building in ARCHICAD will match the perspective of the background.
Note: This function is mainly useful in refurbishing, when a photograph of the existing environment is available.
Using the Figure tool, place the scanned image on the Floor Plan at any size or resolution.
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Choose the Document > Creative Imaging > Align View command. ARCHICAD will prompt you to make six clicks on the Floor Plan with the Pencil cursor, identifying the corresponding points between the picture and the plan. The connection lines are drawn automatically.
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Click OK. The camera will be placed on the Floor Plan on a new path.
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Using the Line tool, connect the tops and bottoms of two vertical lines visible on the photograph with their location on the Floor Plan (e.g., the sides of a door or a window, two vertical edges of a wall, or two flagpoles). This will give you four lines, each extending from a floor plan location to a point on the photograph, with the two line pairs connecting where they meet on the Floor Plan.
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Choose the Align View command. The dialog box appears, prompting you to enter the height values for the four points.
Note: For greater precision, you can enter the horizon of the photograph by simply rotating the picture on the Floor Plan so that the horizon is exactly parallel to the unskewed x-axis (otherwise the command will calculate the horizon for you). The precision of the result depends largely on that of the entered points, but even very careful preparation may result in a Camera that is slightly off position. In this case, set the photograph as the background of your 3D window, and fine-tune the Camera’s position in Wireframe or Hidden Line mode using ARCHICAD’s 3D navigation tools.
Select the photo and choose Document > Creative Imaging > Align View.
Select the original scanned photo to be the background picture in the PhotoRendering Settings dialog box. Make sure the width-height ratio of the resulting PhotoRendering is the same as that of the original photo. You can also modify the size of the photo to suit the size of your PhotoRendering window.
Note: You cannot crop the photo. If you must, crop it in a way that the original proportions of the photo stay the same (i.e. cover a part of the photo with a solid white fill), because Align View needs the original proportions of the picture to locate the original target point of the photo. The view will not be aligned precisely if the proportions of the photo have been changed.
For example, if you have a scanned picture of 1200 x 900 and you want a 3D window or PhotoRendering window image of 600 x 450, you would reduce the size of the background photo to 50 percent in the PhotoRendering Settings dialog box. (You can choose this same background in the View > 3D View Options > 3D Window Settings dialog box: click the “Background Color: As in PhotoRendering” radio button.) By selecting the created camera and generating a 3D View or a photorendering, you will see the result - the building is accurately placed in the existing environment.