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Adrian@Stufish
10-29-2008, 10:51 AM
a really silly problem.
One of our artistic bright sparks has created a pile of vector artwork designs for some very fancy neon tube artwork and pushed them about in ACAD as spline curves (hundreds of spline curves).
I need to get them into LW as lines (2 point polys - lots & lots of 2 point polys to make the curves) - which I can easily render with lots of luminosity & glow to previs the effect. But when I collapse the spline curves into polylines they become thousands of segments which I can save as DXF and translate with my old copy of '3DExplorer' into a LW object consisting of thousands of 2 point open curves. Unfortunately I can't find a way to automate turning these thousands into my 2 point polys - freezing them just makes each one into a strange one-dimensional 4 or 5 point poly. And I have millions of points.
safetyman
10-29-2008, 11:23 AM
Not sure this will work, but have you tried extruding the curves out, then in point mode, deleting the ends? This will leave you with all 2-point polys. Not sure if thats what you're after.
Adrian@Stufish
10-29-2008, 12:55 PM
Hundreds and hundres of lines!!!!!

at the moment I'm going through the hundreds & hundres of srange 1 dimensional 4 point polys doing point reduction in batches, which mainly gets them dowm to 2 point polys = lines
biliousfrog
10-29-2008, 01:14 PM
Safetyman's suggestion normally works a treat. Select all points, hit 'e' for extender and drag the points out, then hit delete. You should then have a bunch of 2 point lines
Silkrooster
10-29-2008, 11:52 PM
Since you won't be keeping the new geometry doing them all to once should work.
Silk
archijam
10-30-2008, 05:01 AM
I have an autocad script somewhere which does a pretty good job of converting splines to polylines .. PM me.

Also, try opening in illustrator, then use the simplify tool, in combination with the add anchor points command (under path). You can then end up with 'smooth' curves with the minimum number of line segments (use with straight lines turned on).

This is how I reduce the points of thousands of extremely complex contour lines, works really well.