Cineversity

Hello, I’m looking for solutions for easily generating or creating the polygons from polylines out of autocad. I’ve done this plenty of times with Sketchup, but I’d like to not use Sketchup as my generation tool (its Sandbox feature set), and 100% use Cinema. So before I dive into the abyss of reinventing the wheel… any tips of a workflow would be much appreciated.

thanks!

Hi pogomac,

It looks like “splines” that you got there, just a guess. A scene-file would be nicer and more helpful.

The question would be, why don’t you get a polygon mesh from AutoCAD in the first place, or what reason makes you go that way.

The first thought is of course to use the “Loft” object for that, but you will see pretty fast, that this will work only in few instances nicely with such “randomly organized” Splines.

If I would get this and no option to get the data as it needed directly, I might try to get “crossing” Splines.

This is a very simple to use technique.

I consider your Splines are single objects for that, if not use Mesh>Splines>“Explode Segments”

Then use in the top view (in your case) the Mesh>Spline>“Cross Section” Tool and draw the lines where you need new Splines to build a mesh with the “Loft” object. These lines should be parallel to each other so the Loft can work nicely. The closer you “draw” these lines, the more details you get. In this way you can easily adjust the density for your work.

All the best

Sassi

I’m trying to stay out of ‘working’ in Autocad, so that my workflow involves less variables for multiple jobs. I am given the survey data, which happens to be in dwg format. Autocad is not the generator of these dwg files, I just happen to use it in my workflow time to time because of my experience. I don’t see a point in generating the mesh from polylines (splines) in Autocad, if I can do this in C4D (or Sketchup for that matter). I’m looking for a solution inside of C4D from survey data dwg files directly. Workflow workflow workflow

Crosssection is def a solution on my list to explore. I guess I was looking for someone with past experience with Landscape and C4D topology generation from Open Spline data sets. It would be nice to hear from someone who says “Hey! I do that all the time, here’s what you have to do”.  I do appriciate the brainstorming! And I will try what you’ve suggested. Perhaps I’ll find in the end that autocad (or sketchup) is a timesaving middle-man… but that will be the last effort attempts. I’m working on this later in the week again and will post my findings if they are constructive.

Thanks for the reply, Craig.

Let me rephrase then my question. If you like to streamline the creation of Landscape creation, why not using tools such a the DEM Earth in the first place?
http://cinemaplugins.com/c4d-plugins/dem-earth/
I have seen only some presentations, sadly enough—I don’t own it.

But a nice introduction from a certainly production savvy artist is here:
http://www.cineversity.com/vidplaytut/nab_2014_jeremy_cox_day_01
Perhaps progress to minute 25.

All the best
Sassi

I checked that out. Very cool! Sadly, I’m too busy to post the progress I’ve made. Thanks so much for the quick and informative help.

Cool, and thanks for the feedback, very nice of you, Craig! :o)

My best wishes for your project.

Sassi