by face_off » Sun Mar 29, 2015 1:54 am
face_off
Sun Mar 29, 2015 1:54 am
Hi Guillermo
I have now been able to do (with your help - thank you) a reasonably thorough analysis on the use of AEC geometry in AutoCAD.
AutoCAD MEP and AutoCAD Architecture both allow the creation of AEC primitives (ie. Walls, etc). These primitives can be saved in a dwg file, and opened in the standard version of AutoCAD (and they will render in the standalone AutoCAD renderer). Some of these primitives appear to be able to be converted to Solids in the standard version of AutoCAD (and rendered in the Octane plugin), but I could not do this for all AEC primitive types.
The standard version of AutoCAD comes with an API for plugins (which the OctaneRender for AutoCAD plugin uses), which is able to access basic information on the AEC primitives (ie. name, primitive type, etc), but does NOT read AEC primitive geometry (so these primitives will not render in OctaneRender for AutoCAD).
The MEP and Architecture versions of AutoCAD are shipped with an additional API which provides access to more of the AEC primitive data, however based on the help files/documentation for these additional API's, there is no way to get the actual vertex positions, normals and UV for AEC geometry from these functions.
So unfortunately, my conclusion is that rendering of AEC primitives in OctaneRender for AutoCAD will not be possible unless Autodesk enhance the AutoCAD API. If you want to pursue this option, I suggest submitting a feature request to Autodesk to provide API access to AEC geometry data from the AutoCAD ObjectARC .NET API.
Hope that answers you question. Thanks for you help on this analysis, and sorry the answer wasn't what you were after. For time being, you will need to convert AEC objects to Solids prior to rendering with the Octane plugin.
Thanks
Paul