AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Welcome to the interoperability issues of Civil 3D.

[#2]

Could you post your LISP routine? That might come in handy.

[#3]

Have you tried exporting via etransmit? Also, is the 'maintain visual fidelity' box un-checked

[#4]

All credit for the lisp goes to Kent1Cooper and hmsilva over on the Lisp forum.  I found the selection method in one discussion, and then started a new conversation on how to get it to work.  I got these two playing ideas back and forth off eachother with me trying to explain what I wanted.

Basically it keeps exploding the *U blocks however many times they are nested in each other.  It won't explode the regular block or Mtext that comes out.

It asks for a selection set, so you can window an area, or obviously type ALL if you want to just clean up the whole drawing.

[#5]

Thanks for posting the file troma. Unfortunately it doesn't quite fit the bill.

The blocks in our files are prefixed with "AecObjExplode", not U*. I tried modifying the LISP to look for AecObj* but it throws an error "unkown exception occurred..etc." then ACAD crashes with an out-of-memory error.

Part of the problem we've had in trying to get rid of these blocks is out-of-memory crashes, so even if we get the routine to work we'll probably still have that issue (we are trying to use these files in ACAD 2004). Also these blocks are being created in paper space as well, so we have to go through each layout to find and explode the blocks. I don't know of any way to select blocks in all layouts at once, so it becomes a very tedious process.

Anyway, I appreciate your posting the file but I don't think it will solve our problems.

[#6]

Neil, please note that the blocks this was designed for are the anonymous blocks starting with *U, not U*.  That  was probably just a typo, but I want to make sure. If you're editing the lisp you need to know where you're starting from.

These blocks come from exploded C3D objects and labels.  I know some would crusify me for this, but yes, I explode cogo points. (We keep a copy of the original drawing).  When we receive a topo with points that rotate per view that shouldn't (hydrants, catchbasins etc) (and especially the labels), we explode them all so that in our drawing set with multiple view-twists in different viewports we don't have crazy points all over the place.  In that situation this lisp has been a life-saver.

I thought that C3D objects might also turn to *U blocks during EXPORTTOACAD but maybe they don't.

I haven't run into "AecObjExplode" very much. Is that when you run EXPORTTOACAD from a layout instead of from model tab? I have exported drawings quite often, and purged them afterwards.  I think I would have noticed a lot of these blocks in the drawing.

By the way, isn't 'unkown exception occurred' consistant with being out of memory in C3D? I suggest that possibly the lisp is working, but there's not enough memory for the oporation.

[#7]

You may be right about the Exception error being memory related.

The AecObjExplode blocks are created when a layout has multiple scaled viewports. This occurs when we export to Autocad 2004 format. I haven't tested it with newer formats so they may behave differently. I confirmed with tech support the behavior is viewport scale related. By the way, the Drawing Fidelity variable is of no help with this problem.

I changed the variable to Aec*. I didn't try *Aec*, but as I noted I think we'll still have multiple problems to deal with even if I get the tool to work.

I did find that the Layer Delete Express tool cleans out the blocks and layers, but I have to run the tool once for each Aec Block/Layer in the file. At least it doesn't crash the drawing vs. trying to remove them all at once. It would be nice if I could modify that tool to read a list of layers and delete them in series.

Please don't spend time trying to fix the LISP. I don't see it as a solution.

[#8]

Have you tried exporting to a newer version?  If I were you, I would start by exporting to ACAD 2013.  Open it up, clean it up, then export again to 2004.  Even better if you have other versions of CAD lying around you can add another step in between.

[#9]

Coincidently I have to get back into that project today so I'll have a chance to try some other techniques.

The export process takes a while so I hope we can find a way to get a clean drawing without several steps.