Projecting elevations

[Clifton Santiago]

Does anyone know how one can project a 2d building elevation from a 3d model in Max? Or is there a plugin that would do this?

I know Rhino does this but I don't have it. Autocad does this only if the model is Autocad 3d solids (or it used to, I stopped doing 3d in autocad in about 199. Microstation also does it, but I hate Microstation with a passion and I refuse to use it.

Any ideas?

[instinct]

i'm not sure what exactly you want to do. if you just want to create an elevation map as seen from top you can use a falloff map set to distance mode or an override material (fully self illuminated) and fog...but as said am not sure what exactly you need.

Thorsten

[Clifton Santiago]

oh sorry, I guess I wasn't clear... I was thinking like an architect. I need to stop doing that.

I want to project a 2d line (vector) drawing from the facade of a 3d building (i.e. a building elevation drawing). The function would be equivalent to that of "solprof" in autocad.

Cheers,

Aaron

[natty]

Hi Clifton

Autocad can do it i believe, it might be architectural desktop.
you have to import into cad as a 3ds model, choose the elevation you need then make 2d drawing i think ... i havent got AEC so i cant check.

[Clifton Santiago]

Thanks natty. Unfortunately I don't have AEC either.

I probably need to figure out how to write a script that does this.

My typical workaround on a rectiliear facade is to use the section command 2 or 3 times just behind the facade surface to caputure all the info, and then composite and clean up the resulting 2d spline cuts in cad. Of course this doesn't work on a curved facade.

Maybe I will post this question on the Autodesk forum or something. I've been dealing with this issue since Max 1 came out.

[instinct]

am not familiar with autocad...so we are talking about slice images ? you could use to stacked slice modifiers to fake it. Then there is a contour script on scriptspot that finds contours and creates splines (but i dunno if it works with holes, never tried)

Thorsten

[beestee]

There is the new FLATSHOT command in AC2007, you might want to look into that

[Clifton Santiago]

Awesome! Its about time they did that. I hope it works on surfaces imported from Max. Thanks beestee.

[oconv]

in ancient versions acad v12 (dos), there was a lisp tool called project.lsp

[Clifton Santiago]

Nice. I guess that could be helpful for 3d lines or surfaces that Flatshot won't project, which I've just been experimenting with. Does it work like Flatland.lsp? I can't believe I never came across Project.lsp. Can you post it?

It funny but I just got Acad 2007 at work, and the last version of acad I have at home is 2000. It is vastly different and it took me forever to figure out how to make my Acad 11 lisp routines work on it. I even still use lisp routines for hotkeys because I never bothered to customize a PGP file.

It also took me several days to disable all the "user-friendly" features that just slow down veteran users. I am trying to get it to look and run just like Acad14, which I think was ideal. I think it was 1996?

[oconv]

i can't retrieve it from my old disks , but it's here on the net:

http://personales.unican.es/togoresr...12/PROJECT.txt

it still works with acad 2004. but you probably will need another lisp routine to delete double entities.

(for non english acad versions replace line by _line)

[Clifton Santiago]

Hey, thanks a lot oconv. I'll give it a try.

[beestee]

OVERKILL will remove multiple entities, but it will also do some other things that you may need to be aware of. I think it will create plines out of overlaping and end to end line segments.

EDIT: That is a native command I believe, so no need for a lisp

[studioDIM]

maybe i got the issue wrong, but plotting a view to screen does exactly a projection of it and removes any coincident double line.

I used this a LOT of years back with very messy files, and it worked a treat to clean them.

not sure it's fine to this day, or it hasn't been overridden by newer commands like the ones mentioned above.

Lele

[Dynedain]

Illustrate! will output vector renders.

Also, the section tool in max might give you something usefull.