redmotion: February 2007

17 February 2007

News on a new Dxf importer for XSI 6

Ok. It's been a while since I posted, but the good news is that I'm
re-doing the dxf importer(for the last time) and possibly the sunpath for
XSI 6. They will only work in XSI 6 and above and will be written in C#
- a welcome new feature for XSI 6.

C# is a dream (yes microsoft can do something right!) . I've been tinkering on VS C# Express since the beginning of January and I've discovered a way to get dxf data into XSI in less time than the current script manages it.

We're talking an increase (based on a single test file) from one minute plus, down to less than 1 second!!
I've only got lines working currently, so all other elements are skipped. Expect the final version to be a little slower... Well, maybe a couple of seconds slower... :)

For a start, I've dropped the dotXSI format and opted for a conversion to EPS; the XSI EPS import option is faster and brings in curvebased drawings as a single entity. This speeds up importing AND displays in the viewport much faster that 10,000 seperate curves.

There are no import options now, just file selection. If you want to change the scale, just select the curvelist and type a new scale into the SRT.

If you need to import 3d, use the old plugin, as it isn't too slow with polymesh.