Problem importing dwgs / line creation

[le perdusier]

Ok. First post although cgarchitect has been my home page for 2 1/2 years.

 

I'm running 3dsmax 6 with brazil 1.2.21. I'm trying to import dwg plans of a building I am to model, but when I do, the drawings are "shattered". ie. lines are all over the place, non-colinear...basically a mess. I'm importing from autocad 2005, but I'm downsaving to 2000 to avoid other problems I've run into in the past. Also, when I create a straight line in max, it is jagged as hell and may not correspond to the vertices I have placed. I have attached a screencap to illustrate what's up. Any help you can offer would be great.

 

I have imported dwgs literally hundreds of times before without this problem. The jagged line issue I have seen before about a year ago with Viz 4 at another office but I don't remember how I fixed it.

[noi-pi]

As for importing dwg to to MAX....I think it was answered somewhere here.

 

As for your jagged line.....Man, you're too way off the mark!

Click your (jagged) line and reset its coordinates to 0,0,0.

Now make another Line.

[mbowers]

Justin,

 

Prior to importing into Max, Flatten the drawing in autocad. There could be some z coordinate attributes that are affecting your import. On the command prompt (in autocad) type "flatten" and select all objects that you will be importing, it will ask you to remove hidden lines, i usually say no. This may help. Otherwise in Max, instead of referencing the cad file in the file link manager (which will also help with snapping...etc.) i would bind the autocad drawing, assuming the plan won't change. Hope this helps.

 

Matt

[theqball]

also if you are not interested in the file link capabilities then you could use the Legacy AutoCAD import option found in File -> Import.

 

this is the previous import code to Max6 and Viz2005.

 

Ideally it's better to fix what's not so good in Autocad and then re-import.

[le perdusier]

Thanks to all who replied. It turns out my problems were related to the scale of the CAD drawing so that the dwg was TINY in 3ds and VERY far from 0,0. A two second fix in AutoCAD and I was back up and running. Again thanks for the suggestions.