DWG import crashing Vectorworks.

[jojoroberts]

Hello all, first time I've posted on this forum, just got vectorworks beginning of the year, after using auto cad for 3 years.  I have a lot of site plans that I did in auto cad, and need to import into Vectorworks.  some of them keep crashing Vectorworks, and I dont know why.  they were all made when I had a student licence for autocad.

 

attached is the one I need to import that just keeps crashing.  any help would be massively appreciated.

 

I tried searching for some of this and I assume its been mentioned before so apologies if this is going over old ground.

2020 - Bath Racecourse - Site Plan - V1.5.dwg

[Pat Stanford]

It crashes for me on VW2022SP3 also.

 

Get in touch with tech support and send them a copy of the file, and probably the XREF'd files also and they might be able to help you out or at least find the problem for future versions.

[Jeff Prince]

That file has a lot of issues.  I opened it in AutoCAD.  It appears to have been built from a Civil 3D file with some Revit and 3rd party event content added to it.

Many unresolved xrefs and images.  Many blocks from various sources with flaws within them.  Blocks with special characters or excessively long names.  

 

The problems causing Vectorworks to crash exists within the blocks, of which there are thousands of one off instances. If I had to guess, there is probably one single block in there that is causing the problem.  Deleting the blocks from the drawing drops over 20 MB of AutoCAD file size and allows the rest to import into Vectorworks clean.

 

Attached are the following files:

VWX 2021 w/o the blocks

VWX 2021 w/ only the exploded blocks (it's a big one and has some 3d content, took over 40 minutes for VWX to process initially)

DWG consisting of only the blocks found in the bottom site in case you are able to get more assistance with troubleshooting.

In all cases, I added a big diagonal line to assist with lining them up.

 

Not sure if it will help you, but that's the quick and dirty assessment.

 

fixed-no blocks.vwx purged-fixed-blocks only-bottom.dwg exploded blocks only.vwx

Edited May 12, 2022 by jeff prince

[jojoroberts]

thanks guys, it was an old site plan I was sen then added my stuff, not sure who made it originally.  ill take a look at what you've done for me, thanks very much for spending your time on that.  I think you may née right in terms of ones I can't seem to import are ones that I didn't do originally from basically using the DWG from map serve.  the blocks, a lot are what I made for heras fencing etc, and then some are the stages from the staging companies.

[Phillip Tripp]

I've used autocad for 20 years and VW for about 6 and in our current office, we use both.  Autodesk specifically gave our office instructions to do the following pre-processing of files before we used civil 3D created DWG files in autocad.  We will often follow these same steps before importing into VW as well to get the cleanest imports possible into VW.

We run these 2 commands in autocad (-PU and Audit):

-PU/all/*/No - this purges more objects than running purge alone.  Make sure you type the dash before PU.

Audit/Yes - removes file errors.  We have one civil engineer client and we consistently have 84 errors in every file for all 20 reference files we receive from them.  It's because autocad and civil 3D are not as natively compatible as you would imagine, per autodesk.

Other optional commands would be to set UCS to world, confirm drawing units.  Also remove any objects far away from the project site in the DWG file.

For files that have many more DWG layers than reasonable for the amount of objects in the file, we run the wblock command which allows you to select the objects you want to keep, which could be all of them by typing "all", then choose a file export location.  This creates a new file with a cleaned up list of layers only applicable to the objects in your file.  The wblock command was also a recommendation from autodesk for dealing with problematic civil 3D files in autocad.

 

I am sharing this because if a DWG source file can have this many issues in autocad, it is not likely be friendly to VW imports either.  Most DWG files do not require this amount of effort from importing into VW, but it doesn't hurt either to clean up the file ahead of time.