Microstation to 3ds Max Workflow

[dantomaszewski]

Does anyone work back and forth with these programs day to day? I recently started working for an engineering firm and the engineers all use Microstation. Me being a Max user, I was curious if anyone else can chime in on their workflow. The company does mostly highway and bridge work. I've had them export FBX, OBJ, and DWG's. When they come in, though there's always a lot of clean-up. Is that normal?

 

Thanks!

[Virgil Johnson]

Can't say if cleanup is normal myself.

 

I did a road and bridge project last December and the files were from Microstation and came to me in a .dwg format. Everything was there.

 

Alas the person drawing was horrible and there was lot of cleanup not from the translation but from the goof off work.

 

Why anyone is still drawing in 2D is beyond me. Mostly I get Revit and Civil 3D files.

 

I guess this didn't help you all this much.

 

virgil

[dantomaszewski]

Thanks for the reply, Virgil. Yea, I think most of the engineers are still struggling to adapt to all the "new" 3d type programs so anything in that realm scares them. Me not being an engineer by any means, I've been checking out some Autodesk videos on shifting Civil 3d pieces from there to MAX and it seams to help a little bit. Just wanted to see if anyone had any tips or tried and true workflows. I'll really get any range of initial variables form 2d line assemblies to half-assed 3d geometry.

[Scott Dombrowski]

I'm replying mostly to say that you aren't alone. I get a lot of Microstation files from our transportation groups and I don't think I've ever gotten a file that didn't require a bit of cleanup. But the same is true of the Autodesk stuff too. The engineers aren't creating these files specifically for me and are usually on their own time crunch deadlines, so there are always open splines, things on wrong layers, stuff like that. I dream of the day I get a clean Civil3D model.

 

Not that this will help you much, but my Microstation workflow is usually: Save out as .dwg, open in AutoCAD, clean out unneeded layers, move everything to the origin, save, import in Max. I just had a project where the source files were surfaces in InRoads and I saved out LandXML files to import with Civil View, but the geometry was pretty heavy and the various surfaces did not connect together in any tidy sort of way. I have zero knowledge of InRoads so I don't know if that's just how it is or if that's how the engineer drew it. I got some breaklines out of the same file and ended up using those to rebuild the surfaces in Max.

 

tl;dr Yeah, it's normal.

[D C]

We clean drawings up in Microstation. Either in .dgn or .dwg format. I find importing uncleaned drawings into max can lead to problems/buggy 3ds max files down the line.

 

In Microstation, turn off all layers you do not need, you are then left with those that you do! Move the required part of the drawing away from its initial position. Turn on all the layers you turned off, select then delete those layers. Move what is left to origin. Select the the drawing, press 6, then press 1, left click on viewport to drop the element. Continue to drop the element untill the the drawing stays pink when selected. Select the lines and place it into the '0' layer within Microstation. Change all line weights to 0 and colour to white. Save to .dwg.

 

When you bring this into max, it should come through as one layer and as one set of splines in the '0' layer. Nice and clean drawing, ready to use.