soupisgoodfood

Gyroscope
In general I find creating asset items around the origin to be the safest. When you're in your scene layout phase then you'd probably translate an object. So your model being 64000 units away from the origin in AutoCAD may be a problem but I have no real experience with AutoCAD. I've had some DXF files load (no errors) but nothing show, and others show curves. It probably depends on the export settings.

Does AutoCAD have the option of exporting IGES or STL? These are more widely accepted. I think STEP is a SolidWorks file format. With Polytrans, try it out, they have a demo, and see if it works for you.

I want to keep it at 64,000, as that is the distance from the origin that I need to revolve the profile around. The whole drawing does have lines going right from the origin to 64,000, so it's not totally empty around the origin and I've tried importing the complete drawing, too.

I managed to revolve the profile in Maya, then tried exporting using the 3 options at the bottom: SPF_DCE, STL_DCE, and IGES_DCE.

The IGES wouldn't work (I think it either gave an error or simply didn't create a file), but it does save a file if I create a new file with a simple object.

The STL saves an empty file, even with a simple object like a native Maya cylinder. And I made sure I used “export all” each time.

The one that did work was SPF/.wire. It didn't work the first time, but I might just have made a mistake the first time.

AutoCAD does have an STL option (called Lithography) but it asks for “solids or watertight meshes”.

Gyroscope
3DS Max so far has been great for importing CAD data because of Direct Connect. However if you want to skip this step (and Autodesk) you may want to check out Polytrans. These both would be for getting .objs for import into Houdini. I don't know if AutoCAD (never used it) has an export as OBJ natively. Rhino3D is another great option to explore for actual modelling and importing of CAD data.

But even then, I've never had much luck with DXF's, it's usually been STEP, STL or IGES files for the actual 3D information. Whereas DWG and DFX have been just for curves.

For the $F problem on the file dialog, there should be an option in the pop up to uncheck “Show sequences as one entry”.

Thanks. One problem with 3ds Max and Rhino3D is that they're Windows only (well, Rhino does have an experimental version for OS X, it seems). I already have Bootcamp for gaming, but that's a pain for work. Maybe I'll have to bite the bullet and install Parallels or Fusion.

So you think Houdini should be OK importing DXFs that are just plain lines and arcs? Perhaps it's the large scale I was using that is throwing it off?

Polytrans looks interesting. Do you think it's a good tool to have for someone playing around with all these packages, or is it more specialist software?

edward
Try exporting to .obj and then importing that into Houdini.

I don't see any .obj in either export or save as.