How to put a autocad hatch into houdini?

I think Autocad r12 dxf is the only thing you can bring into houdini. Maybe r13 but basically explode everything and clean up your autocad file. Make things as simple as possible. Also make sure that if its archtectural stuff its not done in some global coordinate system where everything lives a few million units off to one side or the other. That's all I can remember off the top of my head, been a while since I tried this. I would guesstimate the any hatches needs to be converted to lines also.

Best of luck,
Fabian

Follow Fabian's advice or bring the AutoCAD file in to another application (3DS Max?) and export to one of Houdini's import options:

FBX
OBJ
DXF

are the three most likely to work off the top of my head. I've had decent luck with DXF in the past. Text and hatches don't come through but if you explode them as mentioned above, that should work.

All above is true, although the problem you may already found out is actually limited number of formats autocad supports. I would use 3rd party tool which allows you to convert dwg files into iges format. Iges support lines, not only polygons and can preserve colour which might be a good way to partition geometry in Houdini. I used Rhinoceros in the past a lot and it worked out best out of available solutions.

kuba

I can second Kuba's experience with Rhino. That has worked very nicely on one occasion if I recall correctly.

-Fabian

Exploding the CAD drawing and importing straight from CAD as dxf doesn't seem to work in Houdini 13.

r12 dxf, 2000 dxf, 2004 dxf were all good to import into Houdini (after exploding the CAD drawing, hatching gets imported too)… but in earlier version tho :shock:

I've had some luck with iges files…does autocad still export iges, not sure. Otherwise I, like others have suggested, run it through another app first. In my case Maya.

Sketch-up can be a good bridge here as well, and it's free. Sorta.