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Preserving colors in 3D object export


Roch Comeau

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Hi,

We recently implemented DXF object import in our medical visualization to simplify importing objects created using CAD applications, including Vectorworks. I have found that the objects exported in Vectorworks do not have any color attributes. As a test, if I export something as DXF and re-import into Vectorworks, the colors have disappeared. I tried changing the DXF version in the export dialog, however that does not seem to work. There does not seem to be any color related settings to tweak either. Can someone tell me if this is supposed to work, and if so, is there an obvious setting that I amy be missing?

Thanks in advance,

Roch Comeau

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Hi,

We recently implemented DXF object import in our medical visualization to simplify importing objects created using CAD applications, including Vectorworks. I have found that the objects exported in Vectorworks do not have any color attributes. As a test, if I export something as DXF and re-import into Vectorworks, the colors have disappeared. I tried changing the DXF version in the export dialog, however that does not seem to work. There does not seem to be any color related settings to tweak either. Can someone tell me if this is supposed to work, and if so, is there an obvious setting that I amy be missing?

Thanks in advance,

Roch Comeau

Generally, exporting data from vectorworks into another format such as .dxf and then reimporting that data is likely to give less than statisfying results. Information is always lost in translation.

To put it another way, if you exported a vectorworks file as a .jpg you wouldn't expect vectorworks entities when you imported the .jpg back in.

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Hi,

Just an update. Using the "Map Line Weights to Colors" seems to have worked. Otherwise, VW does not seem to use any of the colors assigned to the objects as part of the export (all the primitives get assigned the same color, which has nothing to do with the colors used in Vectorworks). Kind of a hack I figure that was developed for earlier versions of DXF? Now I have to assign different line-widths as a hidden code to really mean color, then asign the colors to the line-widths on export.

It would be nice if VW were smart enough to use the colors assigned to the primitives in the export, which should be an easy thing.

Thanks for the help!

rcomeau

Edited by Roch Comeau
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