From the course: 3ds Max 2022 Essential Training

Exporting paths from Adobe Illustrator - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2022 Essential Training

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Exporting paths from Adobe Illustrator

- [Instructor] For motion graphics productions or any situation in which you want to import vector art into 3ds Max and convert it to 3D objects, you can take advantage of Max's ability to import Adobe illustrator documents. There are some limitations but you can get vector art into Max and it will be converted to editable splines or Bezier splines. The primary thing to keep in mind is that Max can only read the paths in an illustrator document. It will not be able to reproduce these fill effects for example. Any type that is still editable as text, will need to be converted to spline outlines. Let me demonstrate. If I grabbed the type tool and select one of these type objects, I get a warning message but that's okay. I can click through that. Over in the character panel, we can see that that object is actually a type object. It's got a font size and letting and so on. This will need to be converted to outlines. I'll go back to the select tool, select that object, go into the type menu and choose create outlines. That is a destructive edit. Once we do that, the object is no longer a font based type object. We can't go into the type panel and change the font or anything like that. It's just Rob Bezier curves at this point. Let's do the same thing with the other type object here. Select that. And in the properties panel over here, under quick actions, we've got a shortcut. We can click create outlines. Now both of those type objects have been converted to outlines. As for the graphic logo here, it's complicated. There are a lot of paths that overlap in interesting ways. If we wanted to reproduce the effect of this logo in 3ds Max, we would have to spend some time analyzing what the illustrator designer did. Take apart their work piece by piece and reconstruct it in a manner that would work in 3D. We don't have time to cover that process in this course. It's really not something that I would want to inflict on beginners. However, I did cover that process in my weekly series 3ds Max Tips, Tricks and Techniques as an example of how to use spline booleans. For the current demonstrations, I'll simplify the process by exporting the type only. We'll delete everything else. Let's go into the layers palette and select all these objects except for the type objects. Click on the little circle on the right to select that and press delete and repeat that process a couple of times to delete everything except for the type objects. Now we're left with nothing but those outlines. And we can save this out to a new file. Go to file, save as and we want to save into the 3ds Max project folder, import sub folder. That's just for convenience because that's where Max is going to go looking when you try to import a file. I'll change the file name to distinguish it from the other version. And I'm going to change the version number for the program here from V2020 to V8 because we need to save the document out as a. ai illustrator file version eight. The reason for that, is that 3ds Max can't read anything later than a version eight. You can blame Adobe for that because the .ai format is proprietary and the format specs are not available to other developers. Well, we've got that set up with the correct file name. We can click save and in the illustrator options, very critically we need to change the version over to illustrator eight. And we get some warnings down here. We can click through. Click okay. We get another warning. Click okay there again. And now that file has been saved out as an illustrator version eight. That's how to prepare an illustrator document for import into 3ds Max. In the next movie, we'll look at the import process in Max.

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