Hi as topic, will glowforge work with 3dsmax 2011? or with Illustrator cs4?
I have been playing around with using Cinema 4D to design a few things, so i’m sure you could come up with a way to use Max as well. You just need to find a way to export out some vector line art from your pieces.
The way i have been doing it is designing the parts flat and then using an instance of it to extrude to the material depth. Then use those part to build my model over to the side in 3d.
Finally i take the original shapes and lay them out into sheets that will fit in the printer and use Sketch & Toon to export vector art the can be opened in Illustrator.
From there you can edit the line colors in Illustrator to mark the parts as cuts or etches.
It’s not as easy as using a program like SketchUp or Rhino but i am more comfortable in Cinema.
I hope this helps you think of a way to work in Max and still get your designs out easily.
I am an avid Autodesk and Adobe user. I can’t comment on Max 11 nor CS4 as I am a subscription user so I am lucky enough to always be using the latest versions of the software, but I think we will have plenty of options. I believe Glowforge is developing a print driver for Illustrator CC so anyone using that should have a direct route to sending to the Glowforge. If they do not support the legacy versions you should still be able to print to a PDF, retaining the vector, and using the Glowforge interface send that.
As far as Max, you can always export to a DWG/DXF and open that file with Illustrator and again print to a PDF. I just tested this in Max 2016 and Illustrator CC 2015 and it worked very well. Give it a shot and see what you think. Just save back a few versions of DWG/DXF when exporting from Max and then try opening in Illustrator.
We haven’t done testing with either, but as noted, you should be able to export in compatible file formats without difficulty.
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