Hidden Line/Technical Drawings

[StompinTom]

Doesn't seem to be any section here about modeling/drawing so I'll stick this here...

I'm looking for a good, reliable way to produce vector drawings from 3d models, something that will accurately draw intersections and will chain lines together properly. I've looked at Rhino (Make2D), AutoCAD (Flatshot) and Blender (Freestyle > SVG exporter) but none of these offer quite what I need.

If anyone has experience creating nice hidden line drawings from 3d models without some horribly convoluted workflow, I would really appreciate it!

As a reference, I'm talking about stuff like Neil Denari's drawings (pre-1995 or so), that kind of stuff. Very hard-line, graphic and clean. I know SketchUp can do stuff like that, but how does it handle intersections of complex objects? How does it handle complex objects in general (for example, along the lines of this: http://ma-steven.blogspot.com/)?

Any tips, hints, references much appreciated.

Thanks.

[bakbek]

Doesn't seem to be any section here about modeling/drawing so I'll stick this here...

I'm looking for a good, reliable way to produce vector drawings from 3d models, something that will accurately draw intersections and will chain lines together properly. I've looked at Rhino (Make2D), AutoCAD (Flatshot) and Blender (Freestyle > SVG exporter) but none of these offer quite what I need.

If anyone has experience creating nice hidden line drawings from 3d models without some horribly convoluted workflow, I would really appreciate it!

As a reference, I'm talking about stuff like Neil Denari's drawings (pre-1995 or so), that kind of stuff. Very hard-line, graphic and clean. I know SketchUp can do stuff like that, but how does it handle intersections of complex objects? How does it handle complex objects in general (for example, along the lines of this: Xuberance)?

Any tips, hints, references much appreciated.

Thanks.

Illustrate! offers great line-work output, though I do not believe it has a vector output... need to digg deeper for that - Digimation: Software

You might want to check SketchUP in Combo with Layout - the "Drafting" little brother of it. you should be able to output to PDF but how much control over the lines you have i did not test for myself yet.

[StompinTom]

Cool, thanks for the tips, Ronen! Will check them out.

Hope the challenged turned out well, looking forward to seeing the final entries...

[foochisung]

in the good / bad old days of 3D flash intro graphics, i used to use swift3D to output vector stuff from max. (yuck, looking back there were a lot of spinning boxes bits)
Not sure if they still have the max plugin. Its been a while, but it was a good way to output a clean vector