Merging overlapping circles to form a single polyline outline.

[Treehugger]

As the title suggests I am looking for help on how to merge overlapping circles to form an overlapping shape as per the attached.

I created the attached in Adobe illustrator.  How can I achieve the same result in AutoCAD.

 

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

[lrm]

Convert the circles to regions then do a Boolean Union.

[Treehugger]

33 minutes ago, lrm said:

Convert the circles to regions then do a Boolean Union.

Hmm. Thanks for your response. lrm How do I do that?

 

[lrm]

1. Give the region command and then select all the circles.
2. After converting the circles to regions give the union command and select all the regions.
3. The resulting shape is a region.  If you want it as a single polyline then explode the shape which will make it a bunch of arcs. YOu can then use pedit join (J)   to join the arcs into a single polyline.

[Treehugger]

Excellent! Thank you very much for taking the time to set it out for me.

 

[steven-g]

Another method would be to draw a rectangle larger than the circles (so they are inside the box) and then use the "boundary" command, make sure island detection is turned on and then pick a point inside the box, but outside the circles, and it will draw a polyline for you tracing the outer edge of all the inner circles. Then delete the bits you no longer need.

[Treehugger]

Thanks steven-g.  That sounds like a quicker route.  I am going to try that too.

Cheers.