topic Re: Export model to 3D .dwg layers in Inventor Forum

Export model to 3D .dwg layers

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 09:09:25 GMT

Is there a way to influence the layers on which parts are placed when exporting a 3d .dwg file for use by customers.

Many of our customers use AutoCAD or similar products and cannot use .stp. My current workflow is exporting from Inventor to Step. Import step in AutoCAD Mechanical and saving as .DWG. (This creates files approximately 20x smaller than direcly from Inventor).

Right now, everything is at layer 0 and every part is a (nested) block.

To change the layhers (so customers can switch visibility for different parts of our assembly) is very time consuming because you need to edit every single block.

Our assemblies are up to 120.000 parts with 1500 unique parts.

Would it be possible to have a custom property in a part or assembly determine what layer it is exported to?

Re: Export model to 3D .dwg layers

johnsonshiue — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 04:39:13 GMT

Hi! I am not aware of a workflow to do that unfortunately.

Many thanks!

Re: Export model to 3D .dwg layers

jtylerbc — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:09:40 GMT

No, there is no way to do that.

However, in case this helps, I will point out that you may be making your file export process a little harder than it needs to be. Instead of exporting as STEP and importing through AutoCAD Mechanical, just use the Import command in AutoCAD and browse to your Inventor file to directly import it to AutoCAD. This results in the same type of nested block structure and reduced file size, but doesn't require going through the STEP format to get there.

There is a slight quirk to the method, in that it doesn't work well with Library paths outside the workspace. This means that if you have library file paths defined in your project file, the parts from them will be missing in the imported DWG model. So you may want to stick with your current STEP-based method if you use a lot of files stored in Library folders. The Content Center folder is also technically a Library path, but since it is normally within the workspace folder it won't cause the same problem.

In my company, our AutoCAD models are usually stripped down to remove unnecessary detail, so these missing parts were going to be deleted anyway in most cases. As a result, the "missing" files actually tend to save me some cleanup time.