Hi Everyone,
I work for a trussing company, i have managed to use all standard DWG files so far as my components.
Until today when I tried importing a circle FT24-CIR 8.0_8-3D.dwg (1.0 MB) It doesn’t seem to be importing correctly for some reason. It should look similar to this
I was wondering if anyone had some advice or knows a solution to fix this issue!
Any help will be much appreciated.
The spars aren’t going to the main tubes… also it seems to be bending out more than the truss… its hard to explain.
Here’s what it looks like for me:
OK, I see now. Opening the dwg in another viewer, it looks like those defects are in the original file:
Strange! I used SolidWorks eDrawings. There seems to be something about that file that not all other apps can process correctly. I’m not a CAD expert, so I can’t tell why, though. The larger tubes are being taken to be straight segments instead of curves…
I thought it might be because SU doesn’t import curves… do you know of any extensions which help import curves? or anything I could use to create my own component?
SU will import curves (though they are always approximated by a sequence of edges in SU). But in this case the entire curved tube is being replaced by a single straight one. Could it be that the curved tube was created using an extrusion technique that non-AutoCAD apps can’t understand?
Possibly… what would be the easiest way of re-creating this component? are there any programs/extensions out there?
Unfortunately, the understanding that the tubes were meant to be curves has been lost during the import. In addition, the truss geometry has become entangled with the distorted tubes because they are all “loose” (ungrouped) geometry and they touch. As a result, I don’t think any automated technique can repair the import, it would need to be redrawn in SketchUp. The hardest part of redrawing will be to cleanly separate the tube edges from the non-tube ones.
Basically this is a problem with the SketchUp DWG/DXF importer. It doesn’t properly support solid or surface geometry that is based on splines (NURBS). I first tried to explode the thing down to triangles inside AutoCad but wasn’t very successful with that. Finally, what I did was to export the file as STL from AutoCad and then use the SketchUp STL plugin to import it into SketchUp. I had to zip it as it is almost 4 MBtruss.zip (1.5 MB)
Anssi
That seems to of done the trick, many thanks for everybody’s help. Its been extremely helpful!
