AUGIWorld Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 18)
Autodesk Impression Making a Better Impression Autodesk® Impression was first released in March 2007. Its purpose is to provide a digital means to create 2D color renderings. It has the ability to convert high-precision drawings into eye-catching design illustrations. It can create these illustrations to look like pencil-drawn sketches, hand-colored renderings, water color renderings, and more. Impression allows users to produce these drawings quickly and accurately. Now that Impression has been around for a year, it is time for Autodesk to rebuild its creation. This Impression is better, faster, stronger, more reliable, and easier to use. Autodesk has added a few more bells and whistles that will aid users in making stunning illustrations. Impression can still handle (and handle better by the way) DWG and DWF files as its standard format of input. It can handle most Autodesk file types including files from AutoCAD®, AutoCAD® LT, AutoCAD® Architecture, Revit®, Autodesk Inventor®, AutoCAD® Civil 3D®, AutoCAD® Map 3D, Autodesk MapGuide®, and AutoCAD® Mechanical. What’s New in Autodesk Impression Release 2? Impression is the ability to fill in an area with a particular color, hatch patter, stroke type, and more. This is still true and has been made even better. The Power Fill tool allows users to fill similar shaped areas according to the set tolerances. This aids by speeding up the fill process. Fill anchors provide a point of reference for the program to better keep a particular area or object on the canvas filled properly, especially when DWG geometry is updated. Another improvement is the Auto Layer feature. When a style override is created, or if new objects with different styles are created, the Auto Layer feature will automatically create a new layer for those objects. This feature can be toggled on or off as desired. Figure 3 Figure 2 Importing data/objects Figure 1 Improvements Impression 2.0 has added some new features and it has improved on several existing ones. One of the main functions of 18 One of the keys to Impression’s speed is its ability to import DWG files. Most of the linework and text in an Impression drawing are created in AutoCAD and imported into Impression for rendering. Improvements to the visual fidelity have been provided in this new release. Impression will now better handle xclipping, non-rectangular viewports, text, plot style tables, annotation scaling, multiple leader lines, block attributes, perspective views, drawing origins, linetype scales, SHX text, definition points, non-plotting layers, solid hatch, and multiple block inserts. An Import Wizard has been set up to assist in importing drawings into Impression. It now has a setting that will set the scale for the stylized strokes. This setting, if selected, will automatically set the scale of the strokes to the scale of the imported objects. A new export engine has been added that allows users to export Impression files into a PDF or a DWF file type. One of the most exciting additions is the Style Map Import. With this, style maps can be saved, exported and then imported into other files more easily. This will allow styles in a file to be imported into another file. If a user is creating a drawing for a project, why recreate the same styles for a second drawing in that same project? This will speed up the drawing creation process. A library of styles can be developed for future use. If a client likes the styles used on one drawing, then the user can easily recreate that style in a second drawing. It works by applying the styles to layers. As long as the same layers are used for the same types of objects in each drawing, then the styles will look the same. w w w. A U G I . c o m
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