Flatten Macro - destroyed drawings

[craigharrison2015]

Hi Please can someone help, I used a flatten macro:

 

C^C_move;_all;;0,0,0;0,0,1e99;_move;_p;;0,0,0;0,0,-1e99;

 

At first everything seemed to be great, but now all the lines on the drawing only show one end of the line with the snap command.

 

I have tried everything but without selecting a few lines at a time and entering 0 for start and end Z there is nothing I can do.

 

I have about 13 houses on this drawing - plans, elevs ans sections 90% complete I need something that can fix the problem asap

[steven-g]

That macro needs to be used with care, if there are arc's in a drawing it can do crazy things, you should always work on a backup copy just in case, if it's possible then use the undo command to get back to a "normal" version of the drawing. Or check your system for a bak copy of the file before changes were made, if you can post a copy of the drawing I or someone esle can check it to look for problem areas.

[craigharrison2015]

Hi thanks for your help, the drawing is 3mb it wont let me email, I have tried zipping and its not made much difference still 3.

 

If I move all the drawing the lines all come back to normal. But I've got quite a few drawing sheets and viewports set up and would rather get the drawing sorted if its possible, maybe someone with full cad could flatten it, if I can email it?

 

Thanks

 

Craig

[ReMark]

Upload the drawing to a file sharing website like DropBox and post a link to it here.

 

NEVER run an unknown command on an original drawing; always test on a copy of the drawing. BUT, if you don't follow this advice, and do run the command on an original drawing, then quit out of the drawing without saving it. No harm; no foul. Every CAD tech should be aware of these two procedures.

[steven-g]

You probably won't be allowed to upload to CADTutor because you are a new user. As ReMark says place it onto dropbox and post the link, it is a free service and is regularly used by users here.

[craigharrison2015]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2cp7o19uyii9jp/4566%20-%20Window%20and%20Door%20openings%20latest.dwg?dl=0

 

The link for the original in progress drawing above

 

I have now split the drawing - a file for each unit (which I was meaning to do at some point anyway), and moved each in model space to 0,0 and all seems fine.......it would still be interesting to know what has gone wrong.

 

thanks for the help

[steven-g]

The biggest problem were the groups. At some point in the drawing history items found themselves with a Z value and these found their way into groups. and also effected a number of dimensions, the dimensions on layer "0 redo dims" will need replacing, you can't see it on the plan but they are a problem. The same goes for the blocks on layer "0 redo blocks". I ungrouped all the group items so there will be a lot of loose lines and things in the drawing, but there were just too many groups to find the ones that contained problem geometry. It is impossible to guess at how the problem started, did this drawing have any real 3D content at any stage?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4hjwh7njgq7jq0/4566%20-%20Window%20and%20Door%20openings%20latest%281%29.dwg?dl=0

[craigharrison2015]

Thanks for that, yeah originally there was a topographical site plan survey on the drawing they are often in 3D (maybe not even produced in autoCAD), and I do use group quite a bit when moving things around. I will definitely be more careful in the future. Everything is 100miles an hour though and always rushed..

 

Thank you very much.

[YZ]

By the look of this dwg the objects all still have an infinite Z value. The macro you used does not seem to have correctly restored the object to a zero Z value.

 

Once an object already has a value of infinity, the flatten macro will no longer restore those object to zero, but to infinity.

 

So keeping on pressing the button will not work unfortunately.

 

If you manually select all lines, then change their Z values to zero, and so on through the object types it will get you out of trouble in this case.

 

My suspicion is that the macro snapped to an object when attempting to move them back down using 0,0 as a base point.

 

Any chance you can restore a version of the dwg and test this amended macro?

 

 C^C_move;_all;;[b]None;[/b]0,0,0;[b]None;[/b]0,0,1e99;_move;_p;;[b]None;[/b]0,0,0;[b]None;[/b]0,0,-1e99;

[craigharrison2015]

Thanks for that, I'll test that macro out in the future. That jobs done and history now - hopefully. I managed to sort the problem by saving each house type as its own drawing and then moving each drawing in model space to 0,0 and all the lines sorted themselves out. In the future I will not start drawing on a topo survey, I will keep my drawings separate. We only use CAD for 2D so the z is just a pain.

 

We also do some NHS work and when we get existing hospital plans they often have z co-ordinates along with quite alot of blocks (which also have z co-ordinates). Where I used to work in manchester we had full CAD and you could explode all the blocks and flatten everything seemed to work a treat.

[YZ]

I use a simlar macro to the one you posted. It works really well.

 

Don't give up on it. It will flatten a topo survey.

 

Because your drawing was starting at close to 0,0 and there was an object at 0,0 I am pretty sure that if your snap was switched off before clicking the macro, or you set snap to "None" in the macro then you will avoid this happening in the future.