Hello. I will try my best to guide you through this, my first tutorial, which is about Panorama Exporter for 3DSMax. First let’s explain exactly what this is about. When one is working, making 3D models of houses, offices or any type of space occupied by humans, the client usually wants to be able to really “see” or have a realistic “feel” of the space, before it is built. One can show plans or blueprints to the client, but he(or she) seldom has a real understanding of space and dimensions. And sometimes still images just aren’t enough. This is where the Panorama Exporter comes in. This is a very simple tool for making interactive “rooms” where the client can “look” around it and have a better feel of what it will be like once it’s built. This tutorial is done in meters. So the first thing to do is go to the “Customize” menu, then select “Units setup”, then select “Metric”. You can work in any units you want, the meters are used for this exercise only.

We will start by importing the blueprint from Autocad. Just click ‘File>Import’ and choose your .cad file. In this case we’ll use a small house I’m currently working on.

Note: There are yellow numbers shown in the pictures that correspond to the numbers shown in the text in parenthesis. Once you select your file, you will see the window shown at left. Click on the “Layers” tab to show the layers for the autocad file.

For this example we only need the wall layer.

You should see your object like in the picture. Then select it, go to the modify panel and right-click where it says “editable spline”.

After that, select “editable mesh” to convert the spline to a mesh object.

Let’s switch to “perspective” view or “user” view to see the drawing in 3 dimensions. Select your object and under the “modify” tab select ‘Editable Mesh>Polygon’. Then select all the polygons that form the house.