TABLE OF CONTENTS In Chapter 14, you had some exposure to the ways that you can use Photoshop interactively with VIZ. Another set of products that are very useful with VIZ are AutoCAD-based applications including AutoCAD itself, AutoCAD LT, Mechanical Desktop (MDT), and Architectural Desktop (ADT). You can use any of these CAD programs to help create material maps and analyze photos for VIZ backgrounds. In this chapter, you'll look at ways that you can use AutoCAD-based applications more directly with VIZ in your design and visualization workflow. You'll explore the most common strategy, which is to import 2D AutoCAD line drawings as a starting point in the creation of VIZ geometry.
The tight integration between all of Autodesk's AutoCAD-based products and VIZ 2005 allows you to maximize the strengths of each program in your workflow. By using CAD and VIZ together, you can maintain a single design database that carries through your entire workflow. VIZ will never overwrite an AutoCAD DWG or DXF file that you import or link into your scene, so you can be sure of the integrity of your design database.
Depending on your particular needs and skill level with each program, you will need to consider several strategies for planning the tasks to perform in each software package.
Although it is possible to create your entire project in VIZ alone, you are not advised to do so. VIZ's real strengths are in modeling complex forms,...
