My job, in a lot of situations, requires me to import splines to 3d-Studio from Illustrator.  However, doing this results in splines that contain 10 million verts, causing me hours of tedious clean-up work before they can be manipulated without locking up my system.  Is there a way to avoid this?  Or at least a way to make the clean-up work significantly easier?  I am using Illustrator CS3, exporting the paths as DXF Files, and then importing the DXFs into 3d Studio Max 9 (SP2).  I have tried using DWG files also with the same result.  Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

There is a modifier called Normalize Spline.  It will take a spline and evenly space vertices along the entire line.  One thing I don’t like about it is that all vertices are set to Smooth instead of Bezier (corner) and it doesn’t maintain the same path.  It works well for cleaning up ACAD arcs that have a billion vertices, but complex curves and any sharp angles tend to suffer.

Why export to DWF?  Can’t you save back to a version of AI file and import that?  Not sure if it would help this or not…

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Thanks for the info, but I tried it and my entire spline disappeared, Which I actually think may be because my shape is extremely detailed.  I’ve tried to import AI paths many times without using DXFs, and it has never worked.  It goes through the process, but nothing actually imports.  Maybe I should try it again and double check for extra layers?  Thanks again.

Chris, Tried your suggestion about saving back to an older version.  I had to go all the way back to 3 but it worked.  Thanks again, you are a life saver.

Glad it worked for you! :)

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Normalize spline is a good techniques but like it was said earlier if you have hard corners it will smooth them.  Do you have access to Rhino? it has some pretty good spline clean up tools.  I’ll look into cs3 and see what the export setting are and i can give some better suggestions. Can you post an example of the .ai you are trying to convert?

Dave
Design ReFrom - My Tutorials

I believe it’s importing the AI information, but it’s scale is miniscule so you may not see it… can you try importing a simpler AI example, and then checking to see if you can CTRL+A (select all), then Z for zoom extents?  Does that show any objects?

When exporting, do you have any export options for resolution of curvature?  Same question for importing.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

INCOMING IMPORT TIP

No Maneswar when exporting *.AI files you basically tell it what version to save to as far as the minuscule size and that’s it on export pretty poor huh? Well, keep in mind *.AI Files have a scale when you set up the project. If you don’t want them to come in small like in max increase the size of the document, what we would call world space scale. Most print work that *.AI files come from are based on the 8.5 inch wide by 11 inch tall piece of paper. there fore most people just import them as is and wonder why their bevels on their logo are like .0002 tall. As an example I have my name as an illustrator file imported into Max from an *.AI file in a 6 foot by 6 foot document and in a 720 by 486 pixel (web,TV,Film document) You can see the difference. It’s just Illustrator uses a world scale for it’s spline size just like max and a lot of Max people aren’t familiar with print.

Just like in Max Scale is very important.

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