topic Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly in Inventor Forum

Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 23:24:11 GMT

I have a file, that I had originally in an IFC format, that I was able to open in Revit, and then exported it as a 3d DWG. This maintained all of the associativity for the part files. I now need to figure out how to get this 3d ".dwg" to convert into an ".iam" . I need to be able to maintain all of the associativity. So far I have only been able to create an ".Iges" that is a single poly mesh and I can do nothing with it for dimensioning. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

Gabriel_Watson — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 21:08:28 GMT

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Importing-AutoCAD-Solids-to-Inventor.html

~~I think you'll need to convert each part into a block, if they haven't been already:~~

Screencast:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/learn-explore/caas/screencast/Main/Details/77ceac63-c772-42df-a7eb-71a1889eea4a.html

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 19:31:16 GMT

They are already separated into blocks. I just can't figure out how to convert the .dwg and have it maintain the separate parts and assembly hierarchy. I've only been able to get it to an iges which puts the entire assembly together as a single part.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

TheCADWhisperer — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 19:44:40 GMT

You don’t want blocks.

This should be easy.

Attach your *.dwg file and end all doubt.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

Gabriel_Watson — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 21:07:52 GMT

1) Make sure you have solids/objects in 3D from your AutoCAD DWG (3D Modelling entities);

2) Open the DWG in Inventor using the "Import" option:

3) This will give you a window for import settings, and as long as you pick the following option you should be good:

Use my sample attached, if needed, for testing.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 17:09:39 GMT

And if it wasn't under NDA I would totally do that...

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 17:13:07 GMT

My options button stays greyed out when I select any file.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

Gabriel_Watson — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 21:01:01 GMT

Are you sure you have "Files of Type" selected for Inventor file types as in my screenshot? Take a screenshot of your screen there then. And make sure you follow the steps I posted.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

TheCADWhisperer — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 12:49:37 GMT

@thewolfshield wrote:
And if it wasn't under NDA I would totally do that...

Make up a dummy file that exhibits the same behavior.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 18:31:30 GMT

Okay, I'll try to get something together to try and suss this out, and thank you for all of your help so far.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:44:04 GMT

The only issue with that is I don't know how to operate Revit. So, these files come to us as *.IFCs, which are a BOM of all of the CAD in the project in a single build file. I then extract just the CAD that I need from the *.IFC and save it as a 3D *.DWG and I can view it as a *.DWG in Inventor and it maintains it's individual parts in the assembly, but is displayed as wires, and not solids. I have not been able to find a way to change this over to an Inventor Assembly. I've only been able to export this as an *.Iges which causes the entire assembly to become a single part and be composed of polygons.

I've included a reference of what the import dialog for the file shows. It greys out the options button and doesn't give me any control for altering the import settings.

You can see the feature bar and the CAD in the next picture and it doesn't give me any singled out parts anywhere in the tree.

The Iges example shows how the CAD imports. It loses all part associativity and saves the assembly as a single part file.

That is the best I can do to describe my issue I think.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

Gabriel_Watson — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 20:14:06 GMT

Try these two methods in the screencast below:

https://autode.sk/3cYLHb5

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 21:15:12 GMT

I tried the first example you showed and in it you had the options on the right under "destination for 2d data" set to new drawing. I have played around with the import settings, changing the settings to create a new parts. After trying out your first way, I am able to import the file, it compiles, and it has some of the parts isolated, but they are still not solids, and aren't saving as individual files. It is likely how it is structured from the original file as some of the parts are the same and they seem to be isolated into separate features that contain similar parts. Some don't however, and I need to be able to work on this assembly as a normal Inventor file and it isn't importing with that ability. The tutorials online make it look so simple.

I've included a screencap of the file open in Inventor. I have turned off the visibility of all the other "parts" and you can see that it has a lot of different parts under a single part.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

Gabriel_Watson — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 21:34:38 GMT

I see. Perhaps you overestimated how the Revit export kept associativity of all components, because it looks like not all solids are defined as separate objects. Having an item tree may not guarantee that all components are fully defined as a pure 3D DWG would have it.
Sorry I can't help further, but I would look into the first export again to see what can be improved, or else you need to manually fix the AutoCAD DWG to have objects/blocks or more structure for Inventor to read.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

thewolfshield — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 21:35:38 GMT

Yeah, that all sounds plausible. Thanks for your help though.

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

JDMather — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 14:07:09 GMT

@thewolfshield wrote:

The only issue with that is I don't know how to operate Revit.

In that case - I recommend that you ask questions on the Revit forum about getting 3D dwg from Revit.

>>Revit Products - Autodesk Community<<

Re: Importing 3d dwg and maintaining the individual part files in an assembly

johnsonshiue — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:53:08 GMT

Hi! If you are on Inventor 2022 (please install 2022.2 update), you may consider leveraging Revit Interop workflow. You can link to Revit rvt file in Inventor. All the components come in as parts in an assembly. There is no need to convert it to 3D dwg.

Many thanks!