Projecting Planar outline of mesh object

[Anonymous]

Hi Forum

I am working in AutoCAD 2017 and have a few complicated meshes that I am modelling with, is there any way to project a 2d planar outline of the mesh objects without having to physically trace it manually?

Regards

Jonathan

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

please find command _PROJECTGEOMETRY (>>>details<<<).

Is that what you are looking for?

- alfred -

[Anonymous]

Hi Alfred

Thanks for your response, unfortunately I am not trying to project to the mesh, but rather extract its planar outline with a simple cad command. In the screen captures below, the yellow geometry is a mesh, approximately 44k vertices, the white shape is more or less what im after, a planar outline of the mesh. I did this my extracting all the edges of the shape and projecting the resulting 3d polylines to a plane I created at the base of this mesh. i then have to go and try to cleanly delete the non-essential 3d polyliine to try to find the outline shape, but i often delete the wrong lines and loose the shape definition that I am looking for.

Regards

Jonathan

[Alfred.NESWADBA · Accepted solution]

Hi,

please try these steps:

Run command _FLATTEN, that brings your object down to Z=0.0

• Then run one time command _EXPLODE
• Now erase the inside entities which you can select fast, it does not matter that you get exactly all of them, but the more you can erase the faster the next steps will be.
• Create a rectangle around all your objects (just to have an outside placed border.
• Run command _BOUNDARY and pick a point inside the rectangle, but outside your geometry

...this should result in an outline of your geom.

HTH, - alfred -

[Anonymous]

Thanks Alfred

This worked for me.

Regards

Jonathan