Joining... Merging... Melting... Whatever you want to call it...

[icewater]

I have been struggling for hours now to get a complex drawing simplified.

What I am looking for is a function similar to what I use in LightWave. There they call it "merge", and what it does is it merges points that are within a certain distance of eachother. Like this:



I have tried creating plines to simplify them with a LSP script, but ACAD does not seem to be wanting to merge points. Only lines.

For instance, I want something like this:


Turned into something like this:


I've tried loads of stuff and searched for scripts, but I'm about to give up all together. Just can't seem to find anything that comes near it.

I can simplify polylines and so on, but that is on single lines. What I want is more or less based on points (endpoints), connecting them up if they are within a certain distance of eachother, but not like with overkill, where it deletes lines that are within a certain distance.

I need the endpoints of lines to be merged, melted, joined... Whatever you want to call it. The final goal being to perform a PEDIT to join the points into a polyline, and finally removing all duplicates.

I hope I explained what I need correctly, and I really hope someone can help...

Best regards,
ice

[BIGAL]

Looking at second image to me it seems like you have a lot of extra linework that has come from somewhere that you dont want, doing the joins etc is easy and there may be ways of doing this automatically but the clean up part I think can not be done.

Where did the original lines come from was it an import from other software ?

Can you post dwg here.

[icewater]

Hi BigAL, thanks for the reply!

The actual DWG is about 12Mb, so I just cut a part of it to post it here and highlighted some problem areas in red. The biggest problem is the amount of detail which I want to reduce greatly. The plan does not need to be correct, it will be used for visual purposes only.

When I use the "merge" function in LightWave on the small circular thingy, this is the result I get:



And on the walls or windows:


The good thing is that I get to reduce the file drastically for fast display, while retaining a lot of the form of the building so the map is still readabe.

I cannot import the 12Mb file into lightwave as it crashes upon import from dxf (171Mb dxf file)

[icewater]

I tried posting the DWG 2 times with examples, but the post disappears each time... :/

The drawing is a building with too much detail. I want the detail reduced while retaining some general form.

An example from LightWave is here, the file should be here: Merging.dwg

[ReMark]

The closet native AutoCAD command I can think of would be ALIGN, with the scaling option, but even that would not give you the desired results. Sounds like you need a custom lisp routine to emulate the behavior you refer to found in LightWave.

[JD Mather]

Coincident constraint will merge points, but I don't know if there is an automatic method in AutoCAD.

[Murph_map]

The closet native AutoCAD command I can think of would be ALIGN, with the scaling option, but even that would not give you the desired results. Sounds like you need a custom lisp routine to emulate the behavior you refer to found in LightWave.

I agree the Align command then maybe overkill to remove the duplicated points/lines. AutoCAD Map3D and the dwg cleanup tools would come in handy as well.

[Organic]

I know of no such solution although if 'lightwave' works, then why not simply use that before importing it into AutoCad?

[icewater]

Thanks for the feedback! I Will try that coincident constraint, if it works I can try to put it in a lisp routine to automate it.

@Dink: I can't do it in lightwave as the files are already dwg by origin, and the files are too big to import into lightwave, the import engine crashes.

But thanks for the ideas, I have more to go tinker on now

Best regards,
Ice