Importing from autocad

[J. Vector]

I work on a Mac and some of the people I receive files from, work on PC and use autocad. I got Vectorworks to enable me to read the DWG files they send me.

When I am importing these files into Vectorworks, are there some basic things I need to remember so reading these drawings will be easy?

[Joe Newell]

Yes, your colours will be all wonky. Autocad uses colours to define line thicknesses. Or at least it used to back in the days of pen plotters and it seems to have kind of stuck. So a dialog comes up asking you to set colours to line thicknesses. I usually just accept the default and change the colours later if I don't like them. Autocad users tend to work on black screens and use light fluorescent colours that don't show up well on the white screen that VW users seem to favour.

Scale is something to watch out for. Surveyors will use imperial or metric but the smallest increment is usually feet (or metres) so you have to scale everything up by 12X (or 1000)

Vectorworks usually asks you to define the scale when you import a dwg file. I accept the default and work it out later.

Up to Version 14 Acad there were no objects as in Vectorworks so everything is lines. This is not a problem importing but exporting to DWG you will lose all your hatches and fill patterns. as well as any opacity. So everything you thought wass hidden is suddenly exposed to view like so much dirty underwear.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

[TiTaNiuM sAMuRai]

Watch for the version of AutoCAD being used.

Get the sender to x-bind any xrefs.

Paperspace doesn't really convert well at all. Pray that the sender hasn't used viewports extensively.