I recently made the jump to Viz 8 after using Viz 4 for many years. Never had any problems importing my curved polylines from Autocad. They cam in nice and smooth, just as they look in Acad. Now when I import them they are 3 straight lines that make up my curve. I’ve tried all the different setting in the Acad Import dialog box and nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Attached is an example of how they look in Viz.

	Attachment

Changong ‘Curve Steps’ doesn’t change anything?

You may have to edit the splines in VIZ, and make sure that the segments are Curved and not Linear.

- Jenni

Author of “Mastering mental ray”:  http://www.mastering-mentalray.com
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Max Design 2012; Win 7x64 12gb i7 Dual GTX 580; Win 7x64 Intel i7 4-core@3gHx 12gb Quadro 5000 and Tesla C2050.

I agree with Jennifer.  Even though a line may be curved in AutoCad, for some reason the segment changes from Curve to Line.  In subobject Segment mode, select the whole line and do a right-click.  In the upper left Quad there should be a check mark next to Curve, and not Line.

If that isn’t it, post a screen shot of the spline in subobject so we can get a better idea of what’s going on.

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Jennifer O’Connor 29 April 2008 01:34 AM

Changong ‘Curve Steps’ doesn’t change anything?

Yeah I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. You’d think it would though.

Jennifer O’Connor 29 April 2008 01:34 AM

You may have to edit the splines in VIZ, and make sure that the segments are Curved and not Linear.

I’ll give that a shot.

Thanks for the responses Chris & Jenni - I’ll play around some more and see what I can do.

Those don’t look like splines, so what is the original geometry?

Author of “Mastering mental ray”:  http://www.mastering-mentalray.com
4D Artists, Inc.:  http://www.4da-inc.com
Chicago 3ds Max User’s Group: http://www.max3ds.com

Max Design 2012; Win 7x64 12gb i7 Dual GTX 580; Win 7x64 Intel i7 4-core@3gHx 12gb Quadro 5000 and Tesla C2050.

Jennifer O’Connor 03 May 2008 01:42 PM

Those don’t look like splines, so what is the original geometry?

They are curved polylines from Autocad Architecture 2008.

Try importing as Legacy DWG instead of the other and see if that does it. I’m guessing the vertices are changing from Bezier to Bezier Corner which would account for the problem.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

Mark_Gerhard 07 May 2008 09:35 PM

Try importing as Legacy DWG instead of the other and see if that does it. I’m guessing the vertices are changing from Bezier to Bezier Corner which would account for the problem.

Mark - You are the F’n man!!! Seriously thank you....that was it. That keeps the layers grouped together too where I can ungroup them. I’d buy you a beer if I could.

I just learned that from Brian Smith last week.  You can send him the beer!
all the best --m

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

thanks so much for that tip on importing cad files!  what a nightmare i just went through trying to get come architectural dwgs into max.  alot of the curved plines came in all jagged and i couldn’t get it right until i used the “legacy” trick.  hope autodesk fixes this though because the whole point of drawing in cad is to get absolute precision.  if it gets jacked up in max - it’s basically useless to us architects.