Davidm

I had real good luck opening these 3DS files in a cheap Cad program called Turbocad ($ 300 range). I then saved them from there as DXF format and imported them into Vectorworks. They looked good.

I need to make an old fashioned circus tent, 180' x 60', with 8 main support poles. In other words these poles stick way up, 26' above the 12' vertical sides. From the outside the tent looks like a collection of 8 cone shapes, sort of. Also, it would be nice to end up with a hollow object that I could "fly through" on the inside, and look realistic from the inside looking upward. Any ideas ? Right now we still have version 9.5. But if you have any ideas for either ver 9.5 or 10, please let it fly. Thanks.

Thanks Mike I read your previous discussion and saw the photos, but my problem appears different. I even simplified it by setting reflection to none and turning only one light on. But, I still get the same vertical stripes of "surface", interspaced with stripes of transparancey, on a swept cylinder. And , on a cone shaped object, small strokes of "surface" interspaced with transparancy. I just don't get the smooth transparancy like in your clear object photo. Color , in the shader is still set to object attribute. Plain transparancy and no bumps are also set. I have some Jpegs I could send.

I am trying to render some giant lamp shades which were made out of white fabric that will hang from the ceiling of a large special event. The VW objects were made by sweeping a line 360 degrees. However, with plain transparancy and phong reflectivity added I don't get a clean smooth surface transparancy. There are either splotches of solid surface and transparancy mixed together or straight lines of the same mixture. My shader does not use an image. Color is set to object attribute, which is white. This is version 9.5.

I downloaded some 2D tree images contained in an MCD file I found on Vector Depot.( Arbres.mcd ). I want to bring them into my 3D elevation workspace and rotate them as flat thin 3D objects. Since these are just images I cannot rotate them with all of the other 3D objects. Neither can I extrude them. And when I texture map a tree onto a 3D object , the tree now has a white background, where before the original trees were self matting. How can I make the trees into objects, flat thin objects, that can be rotated somewhat and also get rid of the white background around the tree ?