Massive XREF - tricks for simplifications?

[MuirEng]

Hi,

I'm working on a building design supporting a factory. The client has given me a massive and bloated CAD file showing all of their production equipment. The CAD is terrible. For example, instead of using hatch, each little line in a grid is a line. Every tiny little detail is drawn in. There are no internal blocks.

It takes my machine about 15 seconds to process selection of this XREF.

All I want is a zoom out view that more or less show the layout.

I've purged out the drawing but it still contains over one million elements.

Does anyone have any advice here, about how to "decrease the resolution" of this file?

One idea I had was to plot to PDF and then screen capture the PDF at a sensible resolution. Another idea I have is to get my student to trace out the equipment outlines and delete everything else. Both seem clumsy.

[dgorsman · Accepted solution]

Automation requires consistency to function; the more automation desired, the less randomness can be tolerated.  In other words: garbage in, garbage out.

If the drawing is truly all over the place then you have little choice aside from some manual tweaks, such as:

• using quick-select to pick items and push them onto layers with appropriate settings and make the object settings BYLAYER
• using OVERKILL to reduce overlaps and similar problems
• create blocks and insert them as you go
• remove excess annotation scales
• purge/remove excess blocks, REGAPPs, linetypes, etc.
• if you only need portions of the drawing, make a backup copy and erase everything that is irrelevant

But as an aside - 15 seconds?  Thats not much to be complaining about for a complex drawing.

[Anonymous]

WBLOCK out only the linework you need into a new drawing and use that as your xref.

[MuirEng]

Well, I thought fifeteen seconds of down time every time I selected anything on the background was pretty much intolerable...

thanks for the suggestions. In the end we just traced over sections of the drawing to make out own simplified version.