Old School Technical Drawings

[Matt Sugden]

Hi I'm about to embark on some visualisations for some apartments, but a slight hitch is that the drawings are being supplied as old school paper and ink format. Does anyone know of any sneaky way of maybe scanning the images and an OCR equivelant for AutoCAD to import the images, or do I have to get my ruler and tape measure out ?

 

Cheers

 

Matt

[IC]

Hmmm....scale rule time I'm afraid.

 

I'd quickly redraw the elevations in AutoCad and then model from there. Depending on the design it can be quite enjoyable.

[Tom Hamelrijckx]

I once tried two ways; scanning and convert to lines in Illustrator (if I remember well, it could have been another program, but it sure exists) or using the scanned drawing as background in Autocad. Both turned out to be quite clumsy due to the large size of the original drawing to scan. But if that wouldn't be a big deal, I think the second way would be the best (use the scan as background in autocad and draw over it)...

[STRAT]

there are special paper drawing scanners available that convert scanned cad paper drawings into vector lined cad files, but which ever method like this you chose you'll inevitably have to end up re-drawing the drawings in cad from scratch, or nearly from scratch, because these readers are far from accurate, and you'll need absolutely 100% clean accurate cad plans if you want to make decent 3d models from them.

[Fran]

...you'll inevitably have to end up re-drawing the drawings in cad from scratch, or nearly from scratch, because these readers are far from accurate, and you'll need absolutely 100% clean accurate cad plans if you want to make decent 3d models from them.

 

I agree with Stephen. I find it faster to just recreate what I need for the model, rather than pay someone to scan the drawings (and have to wait for them), then have to spend a lot of time cleaning up the drawings to make them suitable to use.

 

BTW, I charge cad hours for having to do this.

[Jim Mann]

Scan-2-CAD usually has an ad at the back of BD.

 

I don't know how good these programs are, the only experience I have had of a scanned drawing was pretty bad. What I received was pretty much just a pile of unconnected lines and all on the same layer. That was four years ago now so I would hope that things have improved.

 

Digitising might be more succesful, but if it were me, I would do the same as Fran and IC by getting the scale rule out and covering the prints with dimensions.

 

Jim

 

PS Will you be adding the results to Virtual Livings news section?

[kainoa]

Personally, I would scan the drawings (or get them scanned for me), then bring them into acad and trace/digitize them.

 

The reason I highly suggest doing them this way is that it will save you a LOT of time. Once you've scaled the drawings correctly, you can use acad to get dimensions very quickly. Also, using the scanned image as a visual guide, tracing/digitizing is very easy.

 

TIP: Scan the drawings at 300dpi, in B/W or Bitmap mode (NOT greyscale or color). It'll be alot easier on your eyes (you can change the color in acad), and on the file size.

 

Using a scale to measure everything and having to move back and forth from PC to drawings is VERY time-consuming. Also, if you scan the drawings and attempt to use some kind of OCR software, it will NOT come out to scale and will thus force you to re-draw it anyway.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

trying to convert bitmaps into vector files via applications that do it for you typically results thousands and thousands of small line segments that make them slow and difficult to work with.

 

scale or scan and trace the bitmap by hand.

[Matt Sugden]

As ever, thanks for the comments guys..... I'm going to get the images enlarged and get myself an acurate measure.

 

Some of these horror stories about broken lines and crappy imports sound like they'll take more time than they'll save!!

 

Cheers