Best way to convert meshes into solids

[Buffeldrek]

hi there folks,

i'm a mechanical guy - and therefore play around with a lot of Solids and Surfaces. But the other day a third party deliverd me a 3D drawing existing only of mesh objects.
I've partly found a way to convert those meshes into surfaces and then to start stiching those into solids - or convert those directly to solids with third party software.

But what is the use of working with meshes in autocad?? Why choose to work with meshes instead of surfaces or solids...
and what is the best way to convert meshes into solids.

thx for the reply

[jaberwok]

Up to and including A2006 there are shapes that cannot be made as solids using only the tools in vanilla acad. :-( AFAIK there is no shape that cannot be made using the surface tools that have been in acad since R10 ( or R9?).

Take a letter-box rectangle, copy it at a distance and rotate one of them 90 degrees. You can't make them into a solid in one go; you need an extruded square and four wedges. Now start thinking about oval ducts. :?

[ccowgill]

I used the mesh as my surface, it makes it great for overlaying an aerial photo and using it it to create a 3d picture, too bad Autodesk got rid of 3dsout in 07, no more exporting the many 3d faces and re-importing them as a single mesh. Anyone have any ideas as to how to combine multiple 3d faces into a single mesh?

[Bill Gilliss]

I use the PFM tool in EasySite to join multiple 3dfaces into a single polyface mesh. Try Googling

convert 3dfaces to mesh +AutoCAD

for any number of others, free and otherwise.