Problems Exporting DWG's

[Duncan303]

Hi Tech,

 

Having a lot of issues exporting DWG files out of FormZ.

 

I've tried to export the attached file from FormZ 8.5 with no success and have also tried from version 8. tried back saving through different versions of DWG, 2000, 2004, 2010 etc etc to no avail.

 

Have exported much larger and more complicated parts of this job, some of which were modelled outside of Form Z reasonably successfully, it took me several tries with each file, getting various levels of success until finally got a full export. same file exported used same settings produces different results??

 

This alloy truss model attached was modelled entirely in FormZ and it would seem like a an easy export as fundamentally it's just a bunch of extruded rectangles.

 

I have attached the resulting dwg. 

 

File sharing like this is an essential part of our work and I feel like this used to be easily achieved using version 6 but has also been a problem through updates 7 & 8.

 

Any suggestions as to what is wrong here?

 

Truss Structure.zip

[setz]

The export of your file as dwg failed for me.  I was able to export after I edited the Name of the Layer " B Frame Front".  There is a character at the beginning of the name which appears as a space but is likely an invalid character.  The dwg export is picky about characters.  It would be nice if the FZ dwg exporter would check for bad characters and substitute a valid character and supply a warning.  I believe it is currently on ADS's developers to do list.

 

Once I was able to export the file, I imported it into another program where I received a warning for bad objects.  I rebuilt the bad objects in FZ simply by selecting a face on the bad object and extruding it.  After placing the original objects on their own layer and ghosting it, the file exports and imports cleanly.

 

I do a huge amount of file sharing, and for this, FZ is really great.  There are very,very rarely any issues with bad geometry created in FZ.  Most of the issues I have in exporting are due to objects originally created in a different modeler and imported into FZ.  While they appear fine in FZ, upon export they reveal their hidden problems.  Because of this I always export the file (as dwg, or more often as stp) and then import it into and save out in the format of the software which my vendors use.  In this way I can be sure that what I am sending out will be clean on their end when they open the file.

 

On a side note, when I exported the file as .stp (my go to format for exports) the file imported cleanly without any errors.

Revised.zip

[Duncan303]

Thank you so much for looking into the issues with that file.

 

I did wonder if it might have something to do with naming of the layers, we've been having some issues with file names and google drive recently as well. 

 

Also thanks for the advice, will check through layer names etc before exporting in the future if we have any further issues. I think after exporting several different parts of the rest of this build and then getting stuck with this I'd lost a bit of patience.

 

thanks again.

[Justin Montoya]

Definitely look out for odd characters in your file names and layers!  No spaces, and no special characters, if you want to maximum compatibility across platforms!

[setz]

Something interesting to note is that the objects which were importing with errors in my other software were not identified by using the criteria presently available in the object doctor.  Perhaps ADS can look at them and see what was triggering an error even though FZ had no apparent issues in dealing with them internally.

[Duncan303]

Been meaning to reply one last time to this thread but couldn't sign in to forum for a number of weeks.

Thanks again for the help. Have exported several models since posting this and found the naming of layers seemed to be the biggest issue. No longer using any spaces in layer names and files export fine.

 

thanks again