Archeform BIM 1.1 targets small practices that draw every plan twice

A chartered engineer in the Czech Republic got tired of drawing his own buildings twice. His fix, a SketchUp extension called Archeform BIM, has reached version 1.1, and this release is built around renovation work: existing, demolished and new construction now live in one SketchUp model, and each phase gets its own set of drawings.

AEC Magazine, which reported the release, describes the developer, Aleš Zvěřina, as someone who runs a small practice and built the tool for his own office. His problem was familiar. SketchUp handled the modelling, but documentation stayed a separate manual job, so plans and sections were redrawn by hand and every change was made twice. When an authority or consultant asked for IFC, what came out was a mesh with a label attached. He priced a full BIM suite, weighed the retraining, and wrote his own extension instead. It now sells for €199 a year with a free 30-day trial.

That leaves the principal of a small practice with a narrower question than BIM adoption in general. Can an add-on to a tool the office already knows produce drawings and data good enough to retire the redraw?

Why the small office is the target market

The magazine frames Archeform as a way to bring BIM tools and "permit-ready drawings" within reach of smaller practices. In Europe, that describes most of the profession. A 2024 open-access paper in the EAAE conference proceedings, drawing on Architects' Council of Europe (ACE) data, shows how small the typical firm is and how far BIM trails simpler tools:

The US picture has the same shape. The AIA firm survey the paper cites put 75.2% of firms in the 1, 9 employee band in 2019, yet those firms accounted for only 18% of staff and 12.8% of billings. The ACE studies also show BIM use rising between 2018 and 2020 and appearing to fall since.

The authors' explanation is that digital solutions are often built with larger enterprises in mind and are hard to scale down, whether the obstacle is cost, a lack of people or the digital competency adoption demands. Zvěřina's decision to skip the suite after weighing retraining fits that pattern closely. An extension that adds BIM elements to software the office already models in goes after the retraining cost specifically, which suggests why a tool like this could reach practices a full suite has not.

From SketchUp geometry to tagged elements

The mechanism is straightforward. Walls, slabs, roofs, stairs, windows and doors are modelled as proper BIM elements rather than loose faces, and the extension builds plans, sections and elevations from them, complete with symbols, layer-based hatches and line weights. Every element holds its IFC class, properties and quantities, and when exported to IFC4 it keeps its material layers intact.

Version 1.1 tightens that export in ways that look minor and aren't. Project information (name, number, author, organisation) now travels inside the IFC file. Storeys carry their elevation. Terrain exports as terrain, where it previously went out as a generic object. Windows and doors split into frame, sash, glass and sill, keep their colours, and arrive with transparent glazing.

Each of those fixes addresses something a receiving consultant would otherwise have to rebuild or guess. A storey without an elevation or a site that reads as an unnamed object is exactly the "mesh with a name on it" problem Zvěřina set out to solve, which suggests the 1.1 changes were written from the receiving end of the file.

Renovation phases and the schedules behind them

Renovation is where drawing everything twice costs the most. The same wall can be existing on one sheet and demolished on the next, and a hand-maintained set has to keep both in step. Archeform's approach keeps the phases in one model and generates a separate drawing set for each, so a change made once shows up in every phase set. Building services (MEP) get their own drawing sets too.

Quantities come out of the same model. The new material schedules cover walls, slabs and roofs, reporting area, volume and count by material and thickness, with an optional breakdown by storey, and they export as CSV. For practices that send quantities to a cost consultant or contractor as a spreadsheet, that removes a manual takeoff step. For practices that never price their own work, it matters less.

The modelling changes read like a practitioner's list. Walls and columns now take a base offset, which lets a partition extend down to the structural slab or a column begin on a plinth. Stairs and ramps can either follow a target storey or take a height entered by hand. Among the new elements are sectional garage doors, which arrive with IFC data, schedule entries and plan symbols, plus a frameless glass railing that sits in a base channel.

For MEP work, the extension can route connections to and from ports automatically, and alignment guides cover ports, pipes and risers. A second system can be laid next to an existing one using a parallel run tool. Splitting of risers by storey happens automatically, so every level displays its own section of the riser in plans, in schedules and in the IFC export.

What €199 buys against the plugin stack

SketchUp practices already assemble documentation from single-purpose plugins, and the prices give a useful frame. A 2026 plugin roundup published by MUZWalls, which says openly that it lists its own wall tool, puts these figures next to each other:

Adding the two paid single-purpose tools comes to €218 a year, close to Archeform's price, but they cover a different scope: hatched drawings and smarter walls, with no element-level IFC classification. The same roundup describes Trimble Connect's IFC export as good enough for most coordination with Revit-based consultants while stopping short of full BIM authoring. Archeform's pitch is the bundle, with drawings, schedules and classified IFC coming from one model.

Neither single-purpose tool is thin. In the roundup's account, Skalp works through SketchUp's own section planes, updates its material-based hatching when geometry changes and exports vector PDF or DWG. MUZWalls, also sold at €29.99 a month, targets European masonry with automatic mitering, self-healing openings, multi-leaf cavity walls and takeoffs that deduct openings.

That wall takeoff partly overlaps Archeform's new material schedules, so an office already paying for walls and quantities would mainly be buying the drawings and the IFC classification. For a practice that wants finer IFC control than Trimble Connect offers, the roundup names IFC Manager as the alternative.

There is a fair counterpoint. A practice that only needs presentable sections for clients gets there for €79, and the native tool keeps moving. Trimble's SketchUp 2027, presented on the company's SketchUp Live stream on October 28 by principal product manager Mark Harrison, introduced non-destructive modelling, hatches and LayOut updates. The SketchUp Help Center explains what non-destructive means in practice: the new Procedural Follow Me keeps the path and profile as an editable component, where the classic tool leaves edges and faces that often have to be rebuilt to change. Archeform's bundle earns its fee only when permit sets and IFC deliverables are regularly on the job list.

When the authority asks for IFC

Singapore shows how a regulator treats this question. Guidance on the government's CORENET X site, updated October 14, says SketchUp may be used for IFC+SG modelling, particularly for smaller-scale projects, and points to GingerBIM, a pilot plugin and browser workspace. In that workflow, users classify elements, enter the required SGPset properties, run a completeness check and export for submission.

The order of operations is instructive. Users set up the project and its building levels before classifying anything. IFC entity types then go onto walls, slabs, columns, beams, doors and windows, with unassigned elements reviewed before export, and reusable presets push property values across multiple elements. Room boundaries and spaces are defined level by level to support area reporting. The page lists GingerBIM as a pilot that welcomes industry testers.

Putting levels first suggests why a storey without an elevation is more than a cosmetic flaw. In a submission workflow, the spatial structure is the frame every classified element hangs on.

The guidance then tells project teams to open the exported file in an IFC viewer and check its geometry, spatial hierarchy, coordinates, storey structure and required IFC+SG data before they submit. The page's summary adds geo-referencing and model coordination to that list. The authority judges the file, not the tool that made it. Several of Archeform's 1.1 changes, such as storey elevations and embedded project information, touch items on that checklist, though the reporting does not say whether the extension handles Singapore's specific property sets.

Running the trial as an evaluation

At €199 a year, Archeform BIM is priced against the hours a small practice spends drawing the same building twice, and its real test is the IFC file an authority or consultant opens at the other end.

Adoption research has a word for what a free trial offers: trialability. A 2024 International Journal of Architectural Computing study of small to mid-sized AEC firms uses Diffusion of Innovations theory, in which adopters move to implementation once they judge a technology testable with minimal risk. That study examined AR, VR and mixed reality rather than BIM. Still, the barriers it found persisting, first-time user adoption and the cost of equipment and training, are close cousins of the retraining bill Zvěřina weighed.

For a practice in a jurisdiction that already asks for IFC with a submission, or with consultants who reject meshes, that check takes an afternoon and settles the purchase on evidence. For an office whose deliverables stop at PDF drawing sets, the cheaper single-purpose plugins and SketchUp 2027's native hatching may cover the need.