CompuServe Thread

Gary- After a bit of experimentation, I determined that I don't have to delete anything or hide anything to get around this problem. I caused the original problem by dxf3ds'ing a floor plan containing about 800 2×4 light fixtures. All the light fixtures were on one layer in AutoCAD and therefore became one object in 3DS (that's the way I wanted to import them, I know there are other options). When I finally figured out the nature of the problem, I broke up the lights onto six layers, hence six 3DS objects. This worked fine. All the lights are rendered in 3DS with no "clipped object" messages. I agree that you should raise the 64K limit substantially because I would prefer to keep all the lights on the same layer in AutoCAD. You may think that this condition would not arise often or that if it did, the workaround I described would not be too much trouble. This is not true in my case. Actually, I was about to dxf3ds an even bigger layer containing office partitions into the same model. My technique for using 3DS generally is to create the 3D geometry in AutoCAD and to maintain 3D models in both AutoCAD and 3DS. This works very well for ongoing building design projects. It allows me to make design revisions in AutoCAD where I maintain my construction documents and very easily translate those revised elements into 3DS. On a related note, Gary, have you increased the number of characters permitted in an object name in 3DSr3? Again, I'd like to not have to edit my layer names before I dump them into 3DS. It doesn't seem that it would be too much of a storage burden, what do you think? I'm wondering how many other architectural types do anything like this. I've been meaning to bring up this topic in this forum, but I guess that's another thread. Thanks for your time Gary, Joe Miller