#AutoCad Solids
3 messages in this thread
First of all, this forum is great! Guys like John Tissavary, Greg Pyros,
Martin Foster, James Murphy, ….. and the Yost group are just fantastic and
can't realize how helpfull they are.
I've learnt more by scanning this forum during the last couple of months than I
could have imagined.
Now to my question:
A friend can draw a lawnmower in AutoCad solids (AME 1.0) in a couple of hours.
He is much faster than me at drawing 3d objects but can only draw in ACAD. All
the objects in the mower will shade fine in ACAD.
I make sure all objects are meshes and explode them to the lowest level. I then
DXF them by entity and load them into 3ds R2.01 one at a time.
The problem is, I am losing faces. Fillet Radii (?radiuses), tubes,
hemispheres, etc. come in great. However, some flat areas between them will be
missing faces in 3ds. I have increased and decreased the weld-threshold, but
the problem persists.
Any advice at all will be appreciated!
Thanks, Michael. I, too, learn so much of what I know on this forum.
As for you missing face problem, this is often a case of inverted normals
(facing away from the camera). If a SURFACE/NORMALS/OBJECT UNIFY… /OBJECT
FLIP doesn't work, try applying a double sided material to the dxf'd object.
If you want to avoid long rendering times you can flip the normal one by one,
but this is time consuming. There is also a way of creating objects in AutoCad
that will have the normals facing the same way when DXFing, but I don't know
how off hand.
Hope this helps,
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
This is a probblem in the way AME solids deal with surface normals. Your faces
aren't missing, they're just facing the wrong way so they come out invisable
when you render them.
You have two choices:
– You can go through the faces one by one to find out which ones are missing
and use the 3DS flip normals feature to fix them. This is super tedious.
– You can turn Force Two-Sided on when you render and the missing faces will
magically appear. Alternately, you can make all of the materials that you use
in the scene into Two-Sided materials. Both of these methods, however, will
increase the time required to render your scene
I hope this helps you.
Bruce Meikle