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

Using the Boundary command (BPOLY) to create 3D boundaries

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

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Using the Boundary command (BPOLY) to create 3D boundaries

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- We're starting another chapter now, and we're going to start creating our polyline boundaries, ready to transition into 3D Studio Max. Now in the previous chapter, we created the layers that those polyline boundaries are going to go on. Those were those 3D layers. So 3D walls external, 3D walls internal, 3D floor. Now, that's all we're going to create. We're not going to create anything complex. Like I said, simple workflow, simple process, to basically guide you into how this works. As you develop your technique and your experience, obviously you'll work with more and more complex drawings and bring them into 3D Studio Max and obviously make them into your 3D Studio Max scenes, with your photo realistic settings, such as your materials, your lighting, and so on. So we're in a new drawing for you. It's called 00_Ground Floor_BOUNDARIES.dwg. And as usual, you can download that from the library to follow along with the videos in this chapter, if you haven't done so already. Now the first thing we need to look at is the boundary command. Now we're going to look at that first, before we start placing any polylines. So on the Home tab on the ribbon, and it's on the Draw panel. And if you click on the fly-out here, you've got Hatch, Gradient, and Boundary. If you click on Boundary, it brings up this dialog box. Now you'll notice that it's got a Pick Points option, similar to the hatch and gradient commands. And the whole idea is that you pick the points inside where you want the boundary to be created. Now island detection can be used, just like it can with hatch and gradient, as well, which is useful. And the object type can either be a polyline or a region. We're just going to use polylines, that's all we need. They don't need to be regions. The boundary set will obviously be the current viewport. You can change that and you can select objects and new boundary sets if you want to. So you can select different objects to define a boundary if you want to, rather than the pick points option. So it's a bit like hatch and gradient. You can pick points, or you can select objects. So you might already have a polyline that you want to be a boundary, and what will happen is it will create a new boundary polyline on top of the existing polyline object, if that's the way you want to go. So that's our boundary creation command there. I'm going to click on Cancel. There's a little keyboard shortcut available, as well, which is bpoly, like so. And that will bring up the same dialog box. And all you're doing here is creating a polyline that forms a boundary. It is just a polyline, it's nothing else. But what this boundary creation command allows you to do is pick points in the area where you want the boundary to be or select objects that you want to form the boundary. So I'll click on Cancel there for now. You now know where the boundary command is or what to type if you want the boundary command. Let's move into the next video now, and start creating these polyline boundaries that we need.

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