From the course: AutoCAD: Importing a 2D Project into 3ds Max

Making sure you save out as the appropriate DWG file type

From the course: AutoCAD: Importing a 2D Project into 3ds Max

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Making sure you save out as the appropriate DWG file type

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now with a new drawing and the drawing is called 00_Ground Floor_WITHBOUNDARIES. So what we've got here is a drawing that you can download from the library that is now all set up basically through all the processes that we've been through in the previous chapters. So you can see there that we've got all of our poly line boundaries, there we go, all set up and ready to go to go into 3D Studio Max. Now, I did mention in previous videos that you would need to have a new drawing naming philosophy. This is our transition drawing, so you ideally don't want the drawing to have the same sort of file name philosophy as your regular 2D AutoCAD drawings that you might be using on the project. So you want to kind of give 'em a different file name. Now, the other thing you want to make sure of as well though before you give anything a file name is when you do that Save As, so when I go up to Save As here on the quick access toolbar, you'll see that we've got here 00_Ground Floor_WITHBOUNDARIES.dwg. That's already in the folder where we're saving to and it comes up here as the file name. Now, we're going to change the file name obviously but you need to make sure that you're using the right file type as well. You'll notice I've got my AutoCAD set to automatically save back to a 2013 DWG file format. What that means is that any version of AutoCAD from 2013 and upwards can read my DWG file. But also, more importantly, any version of 3D Studio Max from 2013 and upwards can also read my DWG file. It's really important because this drawing is going to be a transition drawing. It's got nothing to do with your working AutoCAD 2D drawing. This is our transitional drawing. It's a separate drawing entirely, a separate entity. So what we would do is we'd rename it but also make sure that our files of type are set up accordingly. Now, if you're working with 2018 DWGs, you just simply go in and set it there like so and newer version of AutoCAD by default save to that 2018 DWG file format. But what that means is any version of the software previous to 2018, cannot read that 2018 DWG. So I always save back to 2013 like so. I'm just going to click on Cancel for a moment and then just right click in the drawing area and go to Option. And in the Options dialog box, if you go to Open and Save, that tab there are the top, can you see there? I've got Save as AutoCAD 2013 there. So basically, what happens is it always saves back to 2013 instead of the default which is, as you can see at the top of the list there, 2018. So if I set that there to 2013 like that, apply it and OK it, every time I hit Save As, it'll save as a 2013 DWG instead of a 2018 DWG. It's just a little thing to remember because you never know when you're sending this file out to somebody to use in say 3D Studio Max, they might have an older version of 3D Studio Max that is previous 2018. So that means that they might not be able to open the DWG file or if they're just running AutoCAD and it's previous to AutoCAD 2018, they can't open the DWG file. So the file type is I would say possibly even more important than the new file naming philosophy that you're going to use for your transition drawing to go into 3D Studio Max.

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