In a past issue I mentioned using M-Color as a way to do easy full 24 bit (16.7 million color) elevations, site plans, etc. inside of AutoCAD. For those of you who actually use it here's a quick tip for you. We like to create a elevation and then play with its colors, add bitmaps, touch up the sky and give it clouds, etc. To do this we need to get the M-Color file from and MCL format which is proprietary into PhotoShop. While M-Color can save out images as BMP, TIF, GIF, JPG, PDF, PS, etc. the PDF and PS can generate parsing errors when trying to bring them into PhotoShop. The raster conversions can take M-Color a long time and the files generated aren't very clean. You can also copy to clip board and paste the raster image into PhotoShop, but this is still difficult due to memory limits and file sizes. Instead by saving the image out to a PS file and importing it into Corel Photo Paint you can then save the image out as a 600-dpi non-antialiased image of pretty good quality. The colors sift as you switch from a CMYK to an RGB format, but other than that, it's the best method we've found for converting the data. For those of you who still haven't looked at the program, don't let this set you back. We use it on about 50% of our projects now for both site design and elevation color studies and find both the clients and the city appreciate the drawings. It's a simple program to use and fairly inexpensive for what it does. I can generate in about 4 to 8 hours a complete set of colored elevations compared with how long it takes to generate a complete 3D rendering.
Inside AutoCAD
If you subscribe to the IAC email AutoCAD tips, you may have noticed that Monday's tip was telling you how to change the color of an object in AutoCAD without changing it's layer. Please, don't do this. It makes your drawing hard to edit, and annoys your drafters! Always try whenever possible to make all your settings global - Dimension Scale, Linetype Scale, Object Colors, Object Linetypes, Thickness, Elevation, etc. When you have to change something in your drawing it is always much easier to change it once and have everything on that layer, dim style, etc. be effected, rather than have to individually change every object.
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