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I hate to even bring this up in a VW forum. 

I am working with a Client who uses AutoCad and perhaps because of his knowledge, or lack of knowledge in AutoCad, is having trouble with my DWG exports, opening correctly in Autocad.

Cutting to the chase, one example is he mentioned to me with total impunity that if I sent him a closed polyline he could sweep (revolve in AutoCad vernacular) the shape into a solid.  Well......apparently he was wrong.

So......If anyone out there is an AutoCad Pro, I would love to see if you could 'revolve' the polyline into a solid object, in a dwg format.

I attached a screenshot of the shape.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Screen Shot 2019-09-05 at 6.34.02 AM.png

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This is from rusty memory of when I was working with both platforms, over seven years ago.

When having trouble with curved shapes, you can start by exporting the objects from a clean file. A clean file has no drawing objects, symbols, hatches, linestyles, etc; it has been purged of everything that the purge command will remove. The only layer should be renamed 0 (that's zero).

Set the units to inches or millimeters as applicable and scale at 1:1. Accuracy should be set to at least six decimal places for imperial units. If accuracy is set too low there is the potential for division by zero errors resulting in points that fly off into Autocad outer space.

Make sure your polyline has a width other than zero.

Copy your object(s) from a working file and paste into clean file.

Export to DWG Autocad version 14 or 12.

Then check the result by importing back into another clean file.

See if your polyline has retained it's curve points or were they converted to other points. There used to be one type of curve that was not supported by Autocad. The translation process would approximate the curve using other types of points, usually hundreds of straight line segments.

You might also include a straight line for the rotation axis (or two loci).

Autocad supports solids. You should be able to do the sweep yourself and have it export cleanly. You may have to give the final object a solid fill.

 

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Larry

Thank you for that sage advice 😉 

One take-away was that the precision was a big factor in translating the data, as you had alluded to.

I got my client hooked up with skype so we could screen share, and after a few trial and error attempts we accomplished the task at hand. 

Man, it was more than painful watching what he had to go through in AutoBad to procure the simplest of operations.  Everything he did, as I watched, was command line driven. It made me appreciate being in the Vectorworks universe as opposed to existing in the black hole of the AutoBad universe. I know nothing of AutoBad, so perhaps you can make choices from a shortcut key or from a menu choice, but I surely did not see that happen during our little skype session.

 

For example, after we were successful in creating a sweep (revolve in AutoBad parlance) it took him 5 minutes, with a LOT of typing, to slice the object.  I shared my screen with him and proceeded to demonstrate to him how, in two clicks, using the split tool, I could slice the object anywhere I wished. He kinda sighed after witnessing that.

 

Anyway, again, thanks for time you spent in your post. If you ever find yourself in Tahiti, lunch is on me!  🙂

 

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