I need to make a DXF file for a newly aquired water jet machine here at work. It needsto be a polyline. How can I get the unextruded outline of the shape from my sketchm and convert to polyline and save as dxf? I'm fairly new to Inventor so excuse me if this is a simpel task.
thanks,
Doug
Try this-
Select Convert to Sheet Metal (or do as sheet metal Face to begin with).
Click Flat Pattern (doesn't matter that it is already flat - create the flat pattern).
Right click on the Flat Pattern node and select Save Copy As type *.dxf
when going through the wizzard set it to convert the boundary into polyline.
I haven't tried this - so let me know if it works.
Update - I just tried it and it worked for me. If it doesn't work on your part, can you attach the *.ipt file here?
@Anonymous wrote:You always seem to beat me to the post JD!!
You must be slowing down in your old age.
I had to go find the answer in between fielding student lab questions on DS before I could respond.
This will be a good one for my next lecture though. That is what I love about this forum - gives me real world lecture material for my class.
I used to do the same thing when I was teaching.
I even had some of my senior students monitor the forums and see if they could solve some of the posts themselves.
Couldn't get it to work for some reason. found if I go to the .ipt and edit the sketch I can right click and on the drop down it has an option to export the file and it goes directly to a .dxf file and the lines are polyline on the drawing. Took less than a minute to get what I needed.
Thanks,
You might investigate the other technique as well as it has an option to turn Splines into Polylines.
This is particularly important for bent metal and cut across bend parts.
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