Make illustration from your mesh with Rhino

Vectorial isometric plan from architectural mesh scene

You want to print a mesh 3D model of a building for an architectural visualisation without rebuild the whole 2D scene another way? You need to get a vectorial perspective view of your DXF/DWG file... Here is a solution. This will be quickly and easily done. Only architectural or angular objects/scenes are concerned by this stuff. For roundy meshes objects (ex: spheres, cylinders) you have to rebuild the object in nurbs because there are some angles in roundy mesh object and the software wich will convert a whole mesh into one nurbs surface isn't born yet. If your scene is already with nurbs geometry then no problem.

Conversion from meshes

These two first picture show the meshes of the house. In Shaded mode it's OK but that's not what you want to get and the wire picture is horrible, not at all what is required here.

1 - Import the scene in Rhino, we'll clean up all this.

The whole scene to convert musn't be too heavy or the computer could be frozen for a long time.
Maybe to convert a such scene by a few parts is then more accurate. This kind of computing isn't real time.

2 - Select all the meshes and convert all the facets to nurbs planes with "MeshToNurbs" command.

3 - unselect with a click in the viewport and select all meshes with "SelMesh" commands... Delete

4 - Select all the nurbs surfaces with "All" and type in "Make2D" (menu curves -> from object - >utilities).
You also may use "Make2d4View" for a great industrial 4 views 2D plan.

5 - That's all your ready to export the file to Illustrator, photoshop, or others. The pictur of the top come from an AI file imported in Photoshop.

Another way to make nice sketch or plan stuff is to use the CartoonReyes plug in For MAX.
You can see beside two pictures rendered with CartoonReyes. It give a very good control more intuitive than the "Illustrate" plug in. And you can mix phong, or raytraced objects with cartoon like objects. But the result isn't the same than the Rhino conversion. Basicaly say Rhino would be for plan and texhnical stuff and CartoonReyes would be for draw simulation and fun stuff. Rhino gives Spline, Nurbs or vectorial curves and CartoonReyes a bitmap. These two ways are finnaly very differents.

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