In this previous post, we looked at some code to do a programmatic snapshot of AutoCAD's modelspace, saving the results to an image file. From the discussion that followed, I realised that the code had an undesired (and unnecessary) side-effect of creating a new 3D GS View and leaving the modelspace with that view active. GS Views in AutoCAD 2007 have grey backgrounds by default, and so this change can be quite disturbing for users. The only reason we created the GS View in the first place (if one didn't already exist), was to use it to query the view…

This topic is a follow-up to the previous post dealing with offscreen rendering, and was suggested (and is based on code provided) by Fenton Webb, a member of DevTech Americas who has just moved across to San Rafael. Fenton was until recently part of DevTech EMEA, working from the UK. The basic technique is similar to the one used in the previous post: we use the graphics system to create an "offscreen device", which we then set up and request to create a snapshot of our model. This can work on graphical objects stored in any AutoCAD database, but in…

This question came up in an internal discussion, and I thought I'd share the code provided by our Engineering team with you (with a few minor additions from my side, of course). The idea is to render a 3D scene off-screen (i.e. save to file the rendered image not visible in the editor). In the below code, we do zoom to the extents of the 3D model that gets created, just to show it's there, but the rendering activity itself is not performed by the 3D view that is used to generate the graphics for AutoCAD's editor window. A 3D…