You are thinking too much along the lines of AutoCAD. Impression's fill
tools are MUCH better then ACAD's hatch command and the trees are just trees
as long as they were inserted into the CAD file as blocks. A person would
have a pre-made tree block(s) that they would substitute for the originals
and all of the trees would be colored and exchanged in seconds. Freehand
fills are quite possible, useful, and quick in Impression. Yes, there is
time invested in creating the fills and blocks, that only needs to be done
once. The initial investment of time becomes quite cheap when the things
created get used over and over again. Why does vector info have to be added
before importing? Impression does draw lines. And lastly, yes this would
take a much more substantial computer then my current P4 dog, but so does
practically everything else at this point. I think you are completely
underestimating Impression. I am not sure you would be happy unless it did
have the magic "Make it look good" button.
wrote in message news:5732280@discussion.autodesk.com...
There are two threads in two forums about this particular image, and there's
lots of talk about getting this done in a couple hours. I'm just getting
into this program, and every step in a rendering takes much, much longer
than it will when I've learned the software, but I can't imagine ever being
able to generate an image this large and complex in two hours. This thing
is 22,000 pixels wide when output as a raster image! As a CAD file, it has
more than enough vectors to choke Impression, from what I've seen. The tree
areas are defined by thousands of arcs- will that give Impression pause?
How well will the gap tolerance feature work (I haven't tested it)? If it
doesn't work as well as it should, won't that require additional CAD prep to
better define fill areas? Graphically, how would you handle the park area
east of the pond? The subtleties of that area were probably rendered in by
hand, and were not part of the CAD file. How much of the details of the
image were added during hand rendering, and would therefore require being
added to the vector info before they could be rendered in Impression?
And all these issues aside, the two hour estimate obviously is based on
having a full library of styles and blocks developed and tweaked before
starting this. Add to the estimate the time needed to build the libraries,
since the program doesn't ship with them.
I'd love to watch someone produce this image, as a print-ready raster image,
24" x 101" at 200 dpi, in two hours. You're dreaming!
Dan