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VW and AutoCad


ga

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I am looking for advice from people who have worked with VW on large scale projects involving consultants who work on AutoCad. What is the best method of working and translating drawings and interacting between the two platforms.

The main issues we have so far are paper space, hatches, different scale drawings on one sheet esported to dwg etc.

This is really a huge problem for us and any help would be appreciated.

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Large scale projects is a relative term, but we have had to deal with this issue w/Autocad based consultants. Often, we give export the backgrounds as DWG's to our consultants (engineers, mostly), who use it as they would any other files. Our office is not concerned about titleblock apperances, so they often use their own for the same project. We have been able to transfer TBLK's to others with only font failures (we are Mac based, BTW). Over time, we have learned to ask that consultants do NOT use paper space in their drawings, but this occurs only when we plot their files, which is often now with email. This is quicker and less expsnive since you don't have to wait, or pay, for shipping. Any hatches you want to use I would give to them. In the past Different scaled drawings on the same sheet required us to move them once imported, but I haven't had that problem lately. The import/export functions of VW for DWG's is quite good I find in general. We have had no significant problems in the 5 years I've been working with VW. Hope this helps...

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we are on VW 9.5.3. i know Vw 10 allows the export of solid fills but that is not the most important thing for us. Is there an update to VW 10.0 yet?

can hatches be imported from Autocad to VW without them breaking up into their component lines and dots?

ga

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VW 10.0.1 is out.

You can import hatches from AC into VW with version 10. The hatch has to be a hatch and cannot be a group or nested group of objects when importing. I've seen instances where the hatch is grouped and it will not come in.

What specific problems are you having when exporting? I know you mentioned them above, but didn't go into great detail. More information will allow me to better explain how to work around it.

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The only trouble I've ever had in importing DWG files is when someone sends me a file with an attached (but not "bound") External Reference file. When that happens, I just ask them to bind any Xref's and send the file again, and then the file imports with no problems. Importing the externally referenced model file itself is no good, because there's no way to tell which of the hundred or more AutoCad "layers" should be made visible to produce the plan that I'm interested in.

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the main problem we are having is thatof scale. when we set out a sheet of detail drawing in VW we can have more than one scale on any particular sheet, eg. 1:50 and 1:5 drawings within one titleblock. however this cannot be exported to Autocad because the translation cannot cope with this. so when a drawing like this is opened in autocad , either one piece of the drawing will have changed its actual size or the two different drawings will lose their position on the page and revert to one scale.

The other problem for our consultants is paper space in atuocad. is there any way that we can choose one layer in VW that translates into paper space to allow easy printing?

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Having multiple paper spaces will result in multiple layers in VW.

That's the short and tall of it.

If the AutoCad person needs to draw with multi-paper spaces, then VW is going to view them as multiple layers. Essentially, paper spaces are the equivalent of layers in VW.

If you have VW Architect, there is a merge layers/clases command under the ORganize menu. You can then use this command to merge the layers into one layer.

You say you want all the paper space layers incorporated as one layer for easy printing.

You can print two layers at the same time.

Can you explain why this is an issue?

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quote:

Originally posted by ga:

we can have more than one scale on any particular sheet, eg. 1:50 and 1:5 drawings within one titleblock. however this cannot be exported to Autocad because the translation cannot cope with this

Change all the layers to 1:1 (and when you do that, make sure the "Scale Text" box is checked). Then export that. That will give AutoCad what it likes -- a drawing that's all full size, which it calls a "model". Your consultants, plagued as they are with model space, paper space, and viewports on a daily basis, can very easily create the necessary viewports and zoom and pan around in them till they show the various drawings each at its proper scale and location on the sheet, which is the only way AutoCad can do that.

quote:

Originally posted by ga:

to allow easy printing?

Give them the free and extremely easy-to-use VectorWorks Viewer. Then always send them an MCD file along with the above-described full-size DWG file. They can use the DWG file to draw, and use the MCD file to easily print the drawing sheet(s) contained in the file, or to view them on screen with proper color and line weight. Be sure to include any non-standard fonts you used, or else the Viewer will substitute another font and text entities may not fit in the space you alloted to them.

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the problem is that when we export our drawings to autocad, having selected export classes as dwg layers, the result does not have any paper space component, no matter what we try to do.

i am not bothered about importing from autocad to VW, so much, but it is quite important that we get it right from VW to Autocad.

i dont understand what you mean when you say that multiple paper spaces result in multiple layers in VW, but if this is true, can we do it the other way around ie. multiple layers become multiple paper spaces???

however, the scale issue is the main problem. i just dont think it is possible, having tried everything, we will just have to maintain one scale per sheet.

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