I have a surveyor requesting that we convert our Autocad 2012 Civil 3D files to Autocad 2004 so they can use them to produce as-built drawings. Is that possible? The drawings include profiles and cross sections.
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by tcorey. Go to Solution.
You can send a dumb drawing by using EXPORTTOAUTOCAD2004. This will explode your Civil 3D objects into AutoCAD entities.
If he needs the surface, alignments, etc., use LANDXMLOUT.
I've been down this road and I'll forewarn you that exporting to 2004 has lots of issues. Before you commit make sure to run some tests.
Here are some of the problems you'll face:
1. 2004 does not support text masks. When you export C3D annotations that have masks they will come in to 2004 as MTEXT with the masks embedded. The only way to remove the masks is to explode the MTEXT objects. Of course it's a lot of work to explode and then recombine all those text pieces back to MTEXT. Too you'll have this problem with leaders and dimensions which you certainly don't want to explode. As a workaround you could remove the masks from all your label styles in C3D before exporting, but that is a huge job as well. Thankfully Jeff Mishler created a handy tool to disable all text masks in C3D. Here is a link to the tool: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D/Disabling-text-masks-in-all-styles/m-p/2984950#M15002.... Just run the tool before exporting and all the masks will be gone.
2. 2004 does not support annotation scale. If your C3D drawings have annotative objects or if you have labels displayed in multiple viewports at different scales, you will end up with multiple versions of the annotations in 2004, one for each scale used in C3D. Not only that but the exported annotations do not honor the rotation that was applied to them in rotated viewports in C3D. So you will have numerous pieces of duplicate text and at all sorts of unacceptable rotations. In my experience the amount of work to fix the mess is so overwhelming that I gave up attempting to use the exported file.
3. The exported file will contain numerous blocks named with an aecobjectexplode_sheet (n)_vport (nnn) schema. These blocks represent C3D objects such as profile views that appear at different scales and viewports in the layouts. The blocks bloat the drawing to a horrendous size and getting rid of them is a tedious nightmare.
4. 2004 does not support multi-leaders. I forget what the problem was but as I recall it had something to do with multiple duplicated leaders.
The bottom line is, depending on how complex the source drawings are, you may be in for a tedious and time consuming process (unless you can just dump it off on the surveyors and let them deal with it).
Mark Green
Working on Civil 3D in Canada
I wasn't aware of the locked points issue. Good to know. I'll have to run some experiments with exporting to a newer version first. That might eliminate those troublesome blocks. Still I expect there will be significant issues with annotative objects.
Mark Green
Working on Civil 3D in Canada