Coloured plans

[scg]

How can I colour a plan? I am using AutoCAD 2008lt.

[f700es]

Solid color hatches will work. One could always export out to Photoshop (or similar) to touch-up. Adobe Illustrator can open dwg files and add color.

[Krztoff]

Well if you want to go really fancy, print it out and use some quality pencils, but otherwise use hatches, experiment with them, try combining them with solid fills and gradient fills, try to use light tones and very thin lineweights for hatches (I use 0.05mm), dark tones and thick lineweights make the drawing look really heavy and smudgy. I use solids mostly for shadows or small detailed objects, I recommend using a dense hatch instead, it will look warmer and nicer, use gradient fills for glass, sky, or some parts that need to look deep, 3d or glossy.

 

You also might want to check out "Autodesk Impression" in case you need to color lots of drawings in the future.

[f700es]

Will LT08 do gradient fill hatches?

[Krztoff]

Ups, my bad, always too quick to jump straight to the answer and no time to check the specs (grown so used to the full autocad version that I sometimes forget that LT also exists). It's not available in LT as far as I know

[f700es]

If he has PhotoShop printing the CAD file to a PDF and then opening in PS will do the trick. He can use The Gimp, Paint.net, whatever.

[Krztoff]

Yes that would be a good idea, gives a lot of control over the appearance.

 

It more or less depends on the complexity and size of the drawing. If it is a road plan for example, it might be too big to color in photoshop, not only time consuming, but also demanding on the pc system resources, I think.

[Dipali]

Will LT08 do gradient fill hatches?

 

yes, it does

[PS_Port]

I like Photoshop, the opacity and textures that you can apply to fills are quite nice.

[scg]

Thanks for the input.

 

Hatching in AutoCAD is just too time consuming plus it increases the file size and is a pain with furniture plan layouts and large areas.

 

Photoshop seems to need Illustrator to import the CAD plans with crisp enough line quality, making that solution too fiddly and expensive and I can't see how to do the job in Illustrator alone.

 

Impressions could be the ideal programme, quick and uncomplicated but it seems not to be available stand-alone. Can you offer any advice on how to buy Impressions on a tight budget?

 

Alternatively, is M-Colour worth exploring?