CGTalk - CAD to 3dsmax

View Full Version : CAD to 3dsmax

DIMO

04-22-2003, 10:12 PM

Hi,

it's always the same problem. You have to visualize something somebody made with a CAD tool like ProEngineer or CATIA. On the native system everything is looking great and is fast rendered. But export and import often scramble the whole thing up.

So what's the best way to go?
The only safe thing we found is to export into vrml and then import into max. This has many drawbacks:

1. You have to tesselate in the CAD -System, (most often your client). You will inevitably loose precision and get holes where the patches end.
2. Max doesn't import the normal information of the vrml-file. So you will probably get shading errors.

This means welding the patches together by hand and cleaning everything up. We are going through this nightmare once more right now. And I can't stop asking:

Isn't there a smarter way?

Rhino imports most things well and can tesselate without holes but you get too many vertices and you'll have to set the tesselation settings for each object. Too many polygons...

IGES always seems to have missing faces and trimmings.

Any ideas?

JonStoll

04-23-2003, 07:28 AM

I don't know if this will help much but I've used autocad and saved my objects as .obj and imported into max although I had to turn up my tessalation in cad to get good results then I would export and import into max and then turn on the smooth results checkbox in the edit mesh menue and my modles would look great althought they had a lot of Polygons. Hope that helps

Jon

mridgers

04-23-2003, 08:11 AM

Autocad DWG files are the way forward. Most CAD packages will export them and Max handles theme relatively okay (although sometimes it can take quite a while to import).

-Martin.

powerwave3d

04-23-2003, 07:18 PM

Depends on the software you have access to. Here at work we use Inventor and Mechanical Desktop, Autocad, etc. With Inventor I *.step out a model, then I import that into Mechanical Desktop and *.3ds it out. That seems to work pretty good, keeps everything together. Problem with IGES is it's not a true solid, IGES is nothing but surfaces so it gets hossed up easily.
First thing I normally do is apply that "MultiRes" modifier on the part and it cleans up the part a lot once I get it into Max.
If we were running Inventor 6 (instead of 5.3) there's an actual import plugin for Max that'll let you take the native Inventor file right into Max , part files, assemblies, etc.
I've noticed that if the part is full of organic curves that no matter what process you use it's not going to come over in an "as is" usable state without a lot of rework. I have had some luck with Rhino on parts like that, but like mentioned above the polygon count gets really high.

CGTalk Moderation

01-14-2006, 11:00 PM

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.