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Rainy-Day
21st Jul 2006, 06:45 pm
We have an automation program here that creates 3d models of rooms. However, the files come out to be very large, at up to 50 meg, and we're having a few problems in connection to that, i.e. they're hard to work with in Acad, take a long time to load, save, modify and often we need to email to people and that takes too long and sometimes they don't accept that size. We can do something about the latter issue using various workarounds but not about first issue, i.e. these files are very bulky to work with. So, it seems like there must be a way to flatten a 3d file into a 2d, most importantly hiding, or erasing the lines that should not be visible because they're behind some object. I think there must be a freebie or a fairly cheap program or lisp macro that would do that, do you guys know of anything that has such functionality? Thanks!

p.s. I thought about, and tried exploding everything and erasing unneeded lines. That works fine except that obviously it takes sometimes more time than it's worth.

StykFacE
21st Jul 2006, 06:53 pm
http://cadtutor.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7070

FindAPath
21st Jul 2006, 07:24 pm
There's also the Flatten command in the Express Tools if you're using a newer version.

Rainy-Day
21st Jul 2006, 08:28 pm
Thanks Styk & FindAFace..

It works out just great, and everyone was very impressed that I "figured out a way", 'cause our main Acad programmer said it's impossible & cannot be done, and Autocad support people also said it's impossible. Now I'm considered to be something in between a genius and an enigma.

There's only one minor issue in that it messes up text, breaking it up and simplifying it. But that's not a problem for us 'cause all text coming out of the program is on a separate layer. Neato! I should have searched the forum for that... :unsure:

lucaso
28th Jul 2006, 04:53 pm
what automation prog is that? better have a look around for something else, it sounds like it's from the Stone Age.