Importing to Illustrator with wild problems in scale

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Hello, I am having a somewhat bizarre problem bringing files from Rhino 5 into Adobe Illustrator 2014 which I’m hoping someone will be able to help me think through.

I have a 2d drawing that has already been scaled down from its 3d model. I have tried two routes into illustrator with intent of preserving scale, both with different problems.

The first route is to “simplify curves”, place my drawing at the origin, “export”, save as AI, “preserve model scale”, open in Ai(which has been set to inches). When I do this I get an art board without anything. CntrlA allows me to select something, and when I expand the art board to its limit I see a stray line from one end of the page to the next - indicating that my drawings have become gigantic.

The Second route is to draw a boarder around my drawing, export as .dxf, make an artboard the same size, and specify to “scale to art board”. Classic. When I do this, my drawing appears crooked by more than a few degrees - which is to say, the drawing is out of scale, because my box gets jammed into AI’s art board at a diagonal!

Have I gone completely batty? What am I missing here?

CML

2

Can you post a sample file? --Mitch

3

As Helvetosaur says, a file would be useful. Make sure your lines have no z values and lie on the construction plane (plan view). Illustrator can’t read 3D. It also sounds like you may have a spurious object located far away from what you are trying to export. Sometimes when I import a DXF into Illustrator CS6 the file looks blank but something is selectable in which case I ungroup, release clipping path and apply colour.

4

Just in case - One thing to watch here is that this is not automatic - you do need to enter the correct units in the dialog so that the scale makes sense in AI.

-Pascal

5

Ah, yes, I’m not exactly sure how or when, but I had made the cplane crooked in the “top view.” It appeared elsewhere in other orthogonal views, and I got the drawings to the origin when I moved it from those views. Exporting worked fine after that. Thank you!