Best .dwg file converter?

[Capital]

I've come across a project where I have to do a "painterly" site plan based on a 2D CAD file (.dwg). I plan on using Photoshop, but was wondering what you would recommend for getting the file into a form that it can use. I'd like to be able to pull out things I don't need, like text notes and such, or at least put them into different layers in a .psd or .pdf file.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

[JHalton]

Tell you what I use which is cool. http://www.dwgconverter.com

 

You can grab a free version. It can export dwg into practically anything. You change all the colours and line thickness it produces. You can make jpegs, tiffs, pdf's. All sorts.

 

Let me know what happens please.

 

D

[MJL Imaging]

what about making it a .wmf file and working with it like that? either in Photoshop or Illustrator.

[Wendelld]

You can buy Adobe Acrobat Professional and plot to PDF files. So you will not loose pen assignments and you can scale your drawings to what you really need. Upon importing to Photoshop, you'll just have to input the resolution to match your PSD file. Plot per Layer on Autocad so you can drag your PDF's to your PSD. Hope this help, I'm using it right now.

[upshot]

If you want to do it for free : pdfcreator (can be found at soundforge) acts like a printer and will do .pdf, .tiff, .eps, etc... Or just set up a postscript printer (standard printer in acad) acts similar to pfdcreator.

[ihabkal]

plotting the file from within Autocad at a very high resoultion into one of the many raster formats it provides is not good enough? does it cause artifacts? because it works for me...