"paint" surface finish texture/color onto cad detail

[madcowscarnival]

Is it possible to "apply" a surface finish and color to a cad detail?  A designer sent me his 2-D cad elevation and wants to know if its possible to apply surface finishes and color on that elevation.  I do not want to redraw his file, would be a waste of time, but it would be great if I could quickly point-n-fill the various finishes.

 

He's an old-school cad user, his program has some hatches, but no means to color.

 

If there were discrete bounded shapes, I know I could convert to a solid then apply the finish.  I tried making the full elevation into a solid, but that doesn't work, and I doubt it would recognize areas divided by lines anyway.

 

Is there some other way to accomplish this, like how the fill tool in Microsoft paint works?

 

Thanks all.

Elevation finish-color.plan

[DBCooper]

I did not take a look at your plan but you would need to have some kind of 3D object to apply a material to.  So you might be able to convert the cad lines into closed polylines (or draw closed polylines over them) that you could then convert into solids.  The closest thing that Chief has to a "flood fill" kind of tool would probably be the wall material region or custom backsplash tool but that is really only designed to work on walls.

 

 

 

[madcowscarnival]

Thanks DB, I was hoping there was a cheat code or something to get around making and converting lots of polylines (individual windows/trim/etc). 

[DBCooper]

Yeah, the only "cheat" I know would be to draw it using Chief's parametric objects instead of simple CAD so it would just work.

 

[madcowscarnival]

This morning, started working on the idea of importing CAD as closed polylines and, In the off chance that anybody in the future tries to cheat the system, I found a semi-cheat code.

 

In CAD program, hatch the entities you want to apply materials to, with separate hatch entities.

 

When you import into CA, select the "Hatch entities can be imported as solid-filled polylines" Nice!  * import this into an elevation view for material painting on walls*

 

When the drawing comes in, ctrl+select the new hatch entities (all can be selected at for action)  -> Explode CAD blocks

 

Without deselecting, use pline convert to Polyline solid.

 

Huzzah, now the CAD-defined hatched areas are paintable to the limits of those lines with Chiefs superior material work.

 

DB, I would not have given this a second look without your reply, thank you.