williamday

Yes I remember reading something about even if the autocad file is 3d, if yiu are in a 2d view during the expiry, it will save the file out in 2d and not 3d but thanks for clarifying it. I hear what your saying about remodeling target than importing, but I am going to have 37.5 hours to do this project so remodeling an entire building, making materials, lighting, rendering etc will be a challenge :-) when I sat down with the architect infront of autocad, it certainly looked like he was manipulating a 3d view, but it was all wireframe, not solid geometry, but this coups have been because he was using an old laptop Cheers for the help fellas Regards Will

So if I import a DWG file that was created in AutoCAD 2012 as a 3d object it will actually import as 3d geometry and not 2d line drawings of the file? So far my experience of importing DWG files is that it fills 3D max with lots of layers of 2d splines and no 3d geometry. I won't be involved with the building creation in AA, the architect will be doing that, I will just be importing the building design into 3d max for final material selection, rendering and animation Thanks for the help Regards Will

To me it looks like you have overlapping vertices on the problem areas. I would suggest before you do the chamfer do a select all (ctrl + a) and then do a weld with a very small tolerance. See if that fixes it....just be careful the weld doesn't weld vertices you don't want welded :-) Regards Will

As the title suggests....I'm less concerned with new features as there are always work arounds, thats what great about the 3d modeling environment, there is more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. My main concern with max its how unstable it its, and how it had never been addressed through the annual releases. I have been using 3d max since 8 and I encounter on a daily basis the bug which results in max momentarily hanging then getting the "3d max encountered an error and had to close etc" message. This can be caused by moving a vertex, moving a polygon, undoing several times, or any of a number of standard modeling tasks. Like I mentioned I have used every version off max since 8 and on many different hardware set ups all the way up to 24 gig, hex core machine but it makes no difference. A little bit of a rant I know, but I am curious to know if anyone else experiences these joys of max :-) Regards Will

Hello First post on this forum so hello from me. Some of the work is awe inspiring on this website, so I'm looking forward to be involved with this community. In summary I am by no means a novice of 3d max, modelling or texturing and I have been involved with architectural visualisation before with my company to support various bids. However, recently it has taken a more serious turn whereby I will be collaborating with an architect to produce photorealistic visualisations of a building being designed to support a bid the company I work for is developing. I began researching appropriate workflows of getting the AutoCAD Architecture models into 3d and I am getting somewhat lost. Some sources suggest through dog files I will be able to import the file and it maintains all the 3d information and quite possibly material information so I can focus on rendering and lighting in mental ray. Other tutorials and sources suggest that I will be importing dwg files which will only contain spline and line information which I will use to extrude and remodel the building. For obvious reasons the first workflow will be the proffered, rather than spending my time recreating in 3d max what the architect has already done. As I don't know or use AutoCAD and I can't get some sample files to play around with I was hoping this community could help me out. Either telling what to expect or do, or pointing me at a useful tutorial would be great. I am also wanting to get some quality literature to read over but as amazon is saturated with lots of 3d max, architectural visualisation book for many abilities I am unsure which would be the best. So far 3d dats 3d 2010 architectural visualisation books look good but I am happy to hear people's opinion. I should probably mention, architectural visualisation is not my core ability, I am more involved with real time based simulation and training systems, but this is an opportunity for me develop my viz skills beyond an amateur level Regards Will