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[the6thmonkey]

Hey I've been teaching myself autocad recently to help with my general career and it seems like it might work well with max and your wallworm tools.  I'm curious have you ever heard of anyone (or personally tried) bringing drawings in from autocad to max and then using in wallworm to create ingame geometry.  If not I'll be trying it out in the following weeks after I've brought myself up to speed and I'll report back :)

[wallworm]

This is certainly something that pops up from time to time. It's not something I've tried, but I don't really see any specific reason why it cannot work. My best guess would be that the more you know about all the players (Source, Max, AutoCAD and WW) the more successful the endeavor will be.

[Orvid]

If I'm working on independent geometry I usually do it in Inventor (it's because it works very well with how I think about creating things), and I know that can be imported directly into 3ds max as a model, but I don't know how well it works if you try to export it... Lets find out  ;D

[Orvid]

For the fairly simple model that I tried, WallWorm was able to correctly export the model that I created in Inventor and imported into 3ds Max then exported with WallWorm.

[the6thmonkey]

Awesome, I have access to inventor as well which I will be learning soon so hopefully it will come in useful as well.  I'm suspect Autocad may be useful for map geometry and inventor for models

[wallworm]

Likely any import that you intend to turn into a model is going to be straightforward. Anything you want to turn into world geometry will probably take some cleaning up especially if the polygons are only tris (and full of coplanar polygons) or if there is concave geometry..

[the6thmonkey]

Well its worth a try :)
This video that uses the autocad drawings rather than the 3d geometry reminded me of some of your corvex vids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIIB1jNAez8&list=PLNF2a-qI0iMnf9Bgpfb2Kb7L2VhNaV1D2&index=1

[wallworm]

I recommend you just get CorVex (if you don't already have it) for this kind of design. There are many reasons for this. In the example of the video here, there is going to be a major problem if you want the house layout to be world geometry. It would take a lot longer to break it into valid geometry than all the hassle of exporting/linking/importing is worth. For example, although the live link to AutoCAD is cool, it's really not too useful for world geometry because if you make a change that is Topology Dependent (like using an Edit Poly modifier and breaking up elements), the results are likely to become a nightmare after updating the original CAD file a few times. And because world geometry must be broken up in specific manners, this means that you won't be able to test your scene much in Source (safely) while still working on the AutoCAD scene in AutoCAD.

Hopefully this makes sense.

There are other benefits of CorVex for world geometry, including seamless tiling textures and UV controls, among others.

[the6thmonkey]

yup I was actually thinking from autocad to corvex (because of the texturing stuff) and doing small bits of geometry at a time.  I didn't want to export entire maps from autocad all at once :)
Anywho I think I'm still going to keep giving autocad a go because I need to learn it anyway and its like killing two birds with one stone :)

[wallworm]

Don't get me wrong, as I think that learning AutoCAD is likely a great idea for all kinds of things. Just knowing what I do know in general, my personal course would be build world geometry inside Max. I've never tried AutoCAD files, but I have imported various other kinds of files. Generally speaking, the splines need cleaned up a lot (because they have too many knots). But I am curious to see how the process goes; you should share your experiences with the process for the rest of us.