Insert DXF
Bring a DXF drawing into the sketch you are working in. Its lines, arcs, circles and points become ordinary sketch pieces that you can trim, dimension, move and extrude, and outlines that close become profiles that Extrude and Cut use.
When to Use It
- A part was drawn flat in a CAD or nesting program and you want it as a 3D plate
- A customer sent a DXF of a bracket, a flange or a gusset to cut and bend
- You want a hole pattern or an outline from a drawing as the start of a sketch
Step by Step
- Open a sketch on a plane or a face (see Planes and Faces). Sketching is part of modeling, which comes with the Pro plans.
- On the Sketch tab, click Advanced, then Insert DXF. The Insert DXF panel opens.
- Click Choose a DXF file and pick a .dxf file on your computer.
- Check the Units. A drawing that names its units shows them (for example From the file: millimetres). A drawing that does not say asks you: choose Inches or Millimetres. You can also change the units here if the drawing names the wrong ones.
- Under Layers to include, untick any layer you do not want, such as a layer of notes or bend lines. The number beside each layer is how many pieces it holds.
- Choose where it goes in Place: Drawing's 0,0 on the sketch origin puts the drawing's own origin on the sketch origin; Lower left corner where I click waits for a click and puts the lower left corner of the drawing there.
- Press Insert. A message says what came in and what was left out, and why.
- Choose Extrude or Cut on the Features tab. An outline with circles inside it is one profile with holes.
What Comes In
- LINE becomes a line, ARC an arc, CIRCLE a circle and POINT a sketch point.
- LWPOLYLINE and POLYLINE become a line or an arc for each segment. Bulges are true arcs.
- ELLIPSE and SPLINE become arcs and lines that stay within 0.01 mm of the true curve, because a sketch has no spline piece. The message says how many curves were turned into arcs. A spline saved with only its fit points (no control points) is drawn as straight lines through those points, and the message says so.
- Block inserts are exploded into their pieces, with the insert's position, scale and rotation, and blocks inside blocks up to 8 levels deep. A circle in a block scaled more one way than the other becomes an ellipse, turned into arcs as above.
- Ends closer than 0.01 mm are made one point, and pieces repeated exactly on top of each other are taken once. Pieces that close a loop on their own come in as one closed outline, so it can be extruded at once.
What Is Left Out
- Text (TEXT and MTEXT), dimensions, hatches, leaders, images and 3D pieces are not sketch geometry. They are skipped and counted in the message.
- Pieces with a point that cannot be read or is farther than 10 km from the origin, and arcs or circles with no size, are skipped and counted.
Limits
- A file up to 50 MB and 50,000 pieces, counting the pieces of every block insert. A larger drawing is refused and nothing is inserted: split it into smaller drawings in your CAD program.
- Reading stops after 10 seconds and nothing is inserted. Turning the drawing into sketch pieces when you press Insert has its own 10 seconds, and nothing is inserted if it runs out.
- Ellipses and splines count as more than one piece: a spline counts each of its control points and an ellipse about 64. Once curves are turned into arcs and lines, the drawing may make at most 50,000 sketch pieces and follow at most 2,000,000 points along its curves. A drawing over either is refused and nothing is inserted: leave out layers or split it.
- A file of more than 4,000,000 records (pairs of lines) is refused before it is read in full.
- DWG files cannot be read. Save the drawing as DXF in your CAD program, then insert that. Binary DXF is not read either: save it as ASCII DXF.
Tips and What to Expect
- One Undo takes back the whole insert.
- The drawing reads across and up as you see the sketch on the screen.
- Lines that meet in a T, or a loop with a line hanging off it, are kept as single pieces. Closed outlines are still found when you extrude, as with lines you draw yourself.
- A drawing with tens of thousands of pieces makes the sketch slower to work in. Leave out layers you do not need.
- To just look at a DXF, open it from the File menu instead: it opens as a 2D drawing you can measure.