AutoCAD Plines to max

[xmax07]

Hey all,

 

I’m going to try and model my first house in Max this week.

I already have 2d plans and elevations drawn in Cad that are very detailed.

I understand that many people trace over these drawings with polylines to insure they work correctly with max.

I was hoping to see exactly what other people trace in cad and bring over to max.

 

Thanks

[Geoffc]

Since I work on autocad full time, I choose to create polylines of the walls, floors, etc in cad, extrude them there, and perform any booleans in acad (subtract/union/intersect) while modeling "standard" houses. Cad, by it's nature is just so much more exact for orthagonal structures and measurements.

 

That being said, I recently had to model a sloping and curved sidewalk/curb/street for a corner lot. For this, I did exactly as you said: I traced polylines over the 2d site plan in cad, exported them to max, then raised each vertex in the polyline to the appropriate height (elevation) in Max. Although acad has 3dpolys capable of z coordinates, it is limited to lines, ie, no curves.

[blade911]

hey threr geoff n max!

 

don think cad is limited to jus lines.. i usually all the modellin in cad.. even curves ..not a prob.. unless they are somethin real abnormal.. then thinks its easier to control the vertices in max..

 

otherwise i try to avoid modelin in max ( this is just for the buildin block n surroundings ).. as geoff said.. cad is very accurate.

 

cheers workin

[antonio_frias]

I agree with you Geoff, I do all my modelling in autocad and then bring it into Max, except in rare cases where it is easier to do directly in Max.

Just this week I had a very detailed handrail that was round. Impossible to do in Autocad. I traced it in autocad with the correct length,extruded it in autocad also and the imported it to max and applied the bend modifier to round it

[Vince Paske]

If the lines of the plans you are using are just "lines" and you want them to be polylines - use the Bpoly command to quickly draw closed polylines. It works like hatch, so you have to be careful about things like lines being nicely snapped together still.