I'm designing a 3 demensional site with buildings, trees, chair, etc. The drawing has gotten very large and I have the textures I want to use with it. I would like to eventually have it rendered and put into a program that will allow me to make a "walkthrough" animation.
Does anyone know of an animation program that will import an Autocad file? I'd like it to be easy to use since I won't have a lot of time to learn the animation process.

 

I'm not really sure about what it can do completely... but I used Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects to make some animations in one of my computer graphics classes. That was like 2 years ago, but they were pretty easy to figure out.

 

I know Blender3d is pretty good. Ive fooled around with it abit. I'm not sure about importing autocad...
Blender3d.org and it is free because it's opensource fing02.gif

 

I don't really think any program is going to import a cad file, especially that most cad is 2d? you want to animate in 3d.
Nobody's heard of flash?..

 

For something like that, I'd recommend Lightwave 3D. It's used by a lot of cad designers and depending on the file type your using, it *might* be able to import it. Lightwave handles a lot of different file types, and after a little getting used to it, you should be able to do what you want fairly quickly.

Another recommendation is 3D Studio Max. It's not as intuitive and is more expensive since it comes with very few free plugins, but it's pretty popular.

Depending on your existing file though, you may have to recreate a respresonational model of whatever it is you made in either of these programs, but anything made in a CAD program should be pretty easy to recreate with the tools provided by these apps.

Cinema4D is also pretty cool - not as popular or as powerful as the above, but is fun and quick (and can produce stunning results).

For a much cheaper but not overall bad route, you might check out Bryce or Vue d'Esprit. Both are boolean-based, which means you create objects by adding/subtracting positive and negative space to create the form you want. It's very simple and 'click-n-drag' like interface which makes it quick and easy. It's not as precise or as powerfull as the others though.

I've done a lot of work in 3D modelling, and if once you get started you need a little help, feel free to ask!

 

You can do some amazing things with 3d studio Max... and it IS an expensive program

 

Animating in 3DSM is hard as hell, unless you know what you're doing.
If you know how to draw, I'd go with flash. It's basically frame-by-frame, if you can draw it, you can animate it. There are tricks to making the animation smoother/easier, but for a newbie, frame-by-frame will work just fine for a short simple animation.
I guess I don't really know what you're trying to do..

 

Lightwave is easy to animate in just use that. Buy it cheap off of EBAY.

 

I haven't seen Lightwave on Ebay for a good price. It's basically an $800 program.

I drew a large site with several buildings on it. It's a complete 3d drawing, not 2d. I would like to have a walkthrough animation of it and apply some textures that I have to the buildings, ground, etc. Autocad can export in dwg and dxf. DXF seems to be very popular with a 3d programs.

I don't know what to do right now. Maybe it's a lost cause. I want to have a badass presentation at the end of the semester. But I'm just a student and can't afford a several hundered dollar product.
We have Form Z at school, but it seems very simple in its rendering. Have any of you tried it?