Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Working with AECC Features from Civil 3D to Map 3D or regular AutoCAD

Hi there... This time I want to talk about something that a lot of people does not seems to have clear...
When working with Autodesk Products we have two different line of softwares.... Regular AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT and the Verticals (AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD MAP 3D), for some user they are the same just have different names, but the reality is that they are not the same, they are different, even though that all of them have AutoCAD as engine when you use the verticals you are working with something that is called AECC Features, this smart entities have some intelligent and properties assign to it, and only can be manipulate it for the software that it generate them....
As part of our day by day work, we share our drawings with different people, companies, consultants, etc... and not everybody is using the same software or are on the same realize that we are working with...
How many time have you received a drawing that went you try to open it say, "you have some proxy object in the drawing" ???.... well every time that you see this massage, it means that the drawing was created or manipulated on one of the verticals, to be able to manipulate this entities they need to lose their intelligent and we cannot do it just using the explode command, they need to be export out ...
So how do I make it work???... It is a really simple and fast procedure, that must be done from the vertical software in any of its forms (AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD MAP 3D)...
FILE -> Export -> Export to AutoCAD
And from there you choose the format that you will like to export this drawing to...
What this command does, is it break the intelligent of the AECC features, so you can manipulate them on regular AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT...

@Civil3DBTF