News - Visualisation and Precision Workshop

Brian explains how digital photographs of individual features, can be added to a 1:1 3D wire-frame plan of the ancient structure of which they are part of

Author: Bjørn Lovén

Today - after long days of work, we have now nearly found the Holy Grail of export from CAD to Illustrator. Our long struggle seems to have been worthwhile, although the ennobling thing is not the finding but the quest!

What the workshop has shown so far is that perhaps the programs are not very easy to convert from one to another. Since they are designed for quite different purposes, it is pretty good work to find any “interoperability” at all.

The 3D “Design Cube” (a cubic design “space” of 2 to the 64th units in each dimension used by MicroStation) used by the field surveying may or may not fit comfortably into the 2D “artboard” space of Illustrator, a page size,or even its maximum “full size” working area of about 5.78m.. After some tinkering, we have managed to transfer data to Illustrator, creating reasonably presentable drawings that can be printed at the correct scale.

Thus we have gone a long way toward solving the problem, even though it is humbling experience for dedicated MicroStation users since we found we could only make it work using an intermediate step---AutoCAD. First, it is necessary to turn the 3D files into 2D ones which is easy in icroStation. Then, since MicroStation is extremely “interoperable” with AutoCAD, AutoCAD files are easy to create and these files need never even be opened in AutoCAD, they are immediately exported to Illustrator!

Interoperability between competing systems that are intended for different purposes cannot be taken for granted. It has always been a problem for architects to produce drawings for publications because their big rendered display “boards” wouldn’t “shrink” satisfactorily onto the small formats of publications. Special “dumbed down” drawings were required and to some extent, our workshop was addressing this problem

We have not found the Holy Grail! We’re still working on it but be do have some presentable drawings that didn’t require massive redrawing.

Richard C. Anderson (Architect to the Agora Excavations, Athens)

And everybody agreed it had been a nice trip.