Using Illustrator to Colour in AutoCAD drawings?

Blisterman · 21-01-2009 09:18PM #1

I'm completly new to Illustrator, and need to know, what's the best way to use Adobe Illustrator to Colour in CAD drawings?
I have an AutoCAD drawing, which I want to be able to Colour in particular enclosed areas (Make the walls in a plan solid).

At the moment, I've imported the DWG file into Illustrator, which works, but every line is a separate object. The only way I know to connect them is to either trace over them with the pen tool, or select each set of endpoints and select join (there's hundreds of them, and I find it very fiddly to select the right points, so this is painstakingly slow.) Is there an easy way to convert seperate lines into a polygon, so that I can add a fill to it? Or even better, a paintbucket tool, like in photoshop?

I had previously used photoshop to do this, but the line quality was very poor. And I know you can solid hatch in AutoCAD, but there's other things I want to add to the drawing, besides that.

As a side issue, for some reason, curved lines in my AutoCAD drawing seem to have lots of small loops in them, when I import them. Has anyone ever seen this? Why is this?

Any help, would be much appreciated.

Danbo! · 21-01-2009 10:34PM

Im not familiar with illustrator but if i needed to fill walls i'd either:

A) Polyline the boundaries in cad and solid hatch it, then export to Illustrator and do whatever else you need to do

Print an A0 PDF from the cad drawing and use fill in photoshop. The A0 should make the line quality decent enough, and when you have the plot window open, set it to 'Presentation quality'

I know this isnt what you asked, but may help...

And what do you mean by small loops? It isnt the batting line-type at a tiny scale is it?

Blisterman · 21-01-2009 11:09PM

No, I mean, the line loops around itself, like a rollercoaster.

And even with a very high quality raster file, it doesn't come out of the plotter as sharp as vector files do. It was noticed in a job interview on two occasions.

22-01-2009 10:06AM

Can you post up a screenshot of it in illustrator & what you want to achieve? It's hard to know just from your description.

Illustrator CS3 has a thing called 'live paint' that might suit your needs, so check that out too.

Blisterman · 22-01-2009 12:03PM

I've attached two screenshots so you can see.

Loops.jpg shows what I was talking about regarding the loops. When I imported the file, hundreds of these tiny loops appeared.

Solid walls.jpg shows what I'm trying to achieve (here, I just used the paint bucket on the jpg file in photoshop before importing it)
At the moment, the shapes I want to fill, are made up of many individual lines. I'm looking for a way to turn the individual lines into filled polygon objects.

I tried using the live paint tool, but it seemed very glitchy, where random gaps would appear in lines, and also turned my entire drawing into one object, so not really what I'm trying to do.

22-01-2009 09:13PM

Hrmmm... sounds like a tricky problem. Live Paint is definitely what you want, but i'd say you might need to figure out a better way of getting stuff into Illustrator. Maybe there's another format. You can join lines using some methods like the pathfinder tool, but that's a bit of work. It's tough problem, hope you get it sorted.

Also, did you see this thread: http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=5045083

armchairninja · 23-01-2009 12:53PM

I would generally use the solid hatch in cad, but from time to time I have wanted to do other things to plans in photoshop.
What I do in that case is print the CAD file to a pdf, at a fairly high dpi, and then I open the pdf in photoshop, which will give you a transparent layer with all the lines on it, then you can just fire in a full white layer behind it, just to see what your doing, and start selecting the boundaries you wish to fill using the magic wand tool.

hope that helps, if its a little muddled and all over the place, i can try emplain it better for you if you want.:o

Blisterman · 23-01-2009 01:40PM

Thats exactly what I originally did, but even at a very high DPI, the lines looked either jagged, or blurry.

armchairninja · 23-01-2009 04:40PM

Not sure what the problem is so, that normally works perfectly for me, the loops is a very strange one! Mite be an idea to ask in the Arch Tech forum too, seeing as its the sort of work that arch techs get up to on a daily basis, maybe someone there has an idea or solution.

archie83 · 22-02-2009 04:01PM

have you tried printing to .eps - it preserves the line quality best from Autocad. I would use Photoshop over Illustrator to colour the drawing though - use the magic wand tool and it should be quite simple - hope it works out!

5uspect · 22-02-2009 06:22PM

I had a similar problem with another CAD package and I ended up printing to to PDf using acrobat. Live paint did the job after that.

Carpaydiem · 23-02-2009 10:56AM

I think the loops are being generated as illustrator is getting messed up converting the paths from autocad.

I would go with what archie said, and see if you can export the file as an eps, illustrator should have no problem dealing with that, or photoshop for that matter.

BTW - your issue with PS and the lines being blurry etc - how are you colouring the image in? The lines should be fine when painting in PS, provided the original areas you're filling in have perfectly straight edges. If you're paining and not filling, you should check what type of brush you're using too.

Also, using live paint in illustrator, you can group different sections of your drawing into specific live paint groups, which should get around the problem of having the individual lines as seperate paths.

It could be the case that there are very small gaps between your lines in autocad, hence the drawing when imported to illustrator is not connected together (giving the 'glitches' with live paint you stated). You could reposition the paths/lines in illustrator (time consuming I know, but if you want to do it right..) and join them like you said.

Using Illustrator to Colour in AutoCAD drawings?

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