Convert text to block

[Stephen Thomas]

I have been given a landscape plan where all trees are denoted by a letter 't' and palms by a letter 'p'. I was thinking if I could somehow convert all these letters to triangles then I could import them and use these faces to scatter tree objects in 3ds Max.

 

How would I do this? I've searched for scripts, LISP routines etc. but not had any luck so far. I can do it individually by selecting the text object, converting to block, then drawing the triangle, deleting the text letter and saving the block file. But there are too many to repeat this process manually.

 

Any ideas??

[rmccoy]

I don't have a copy of autocad on me right now to test this out. But you may be able to just bring it into Max and replace your letters straight away. I use Neil Blevins' Soulburn Scripts to do this. I use the "objectReplacer" script when working with massive amounts of data. I usually do this by having a dummy car model that I replace with a random selection of proxied vehicles. It may be able to do something similar for you.

 

http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm

[francosd]

check this site http://3dats.com/tutorials.asp there is a turorial for tath

[Stephen Thomas]

Managed to get there! I didn't think you could import text from Autocad to Max but using the legacy import option you can. Now I can just use an instance replace script to swap them to triangular faces. Cheers for your input.