Unable to insert OR Xattach a .dwg

[camptech]

I am staking a house for a local builder.  The surveyor who did the boundary kindly e-mailed me a .dwg of his survey.

I am able to open his .dwg with Civil3D 2021.  Civil3D gives a warning / announcement that the file was created by a non-Autodesk application.  I decided I would open my standard drawing template, and Xreference the surveyors drawing, so as to keep it "pristine."   However, I am NOT able to xattach NOR classicinsert this .dwg.  Well, I should state... both "xattach" and "classicinsert" quite happily complete with no apparent errors, yet I am quite unable to see anything.  I have selected all layers, and unfrozen them (some were frozen).  I have ran 'audit' several times accepting the "Yes, fix it all" option.  I have zoomed extents.  Nothing.  The drawing does not display.

However, if I go back and open an original "Autodesk Civil3D Imperial (Civil3D 2019).dwg" file from whence Civil3D 2021 was installed... I *am* able to both classicinsert and/or xattach this .dwg drawing.

I opened the .dwg in Civil3D 2021 then exported the drawing as an ACAD 2010 .dwg.  Still not able to classicinsert nor attach the .dwg.

Phutt the wuck?

Has anyone seen this sort of behavior before?  What am I doing wrong?  Or is there a workaround?

I guess I'll just open a copy of the original .dwg and do my work in that file.  But this is annoying.

[user181]

Maybe the surveyor dwg and your template are in different units (meters, inches, feet, etc) and when xrefed it's really small somewhere. After xrefring if you zoom extents and hit ctrl & A can you see objects selected in properties palette or on screen? 

[AllenJessup]

I don't know why it's doing that. But if you open the drawing can you copy paste to a new drawing and save that?

[camptech]

@ User181 -- Appreciate the suggestion.  I re-opened the .dwg and checked it's units.  Twas "feet" as I suspected.

I created a new drawing (i.e. used my default template).  Switched to my usual Xref layer, and ran 'xattach' again.  Specified the .dwg and told it to insert at 5000,5000 (where I usually do my local drafting work).  Did a 'refresh all' and a 'zoom extents' ... still did not see anything.  Tried the 'CTRL-A' and sure enough... in the Selection drop down list of  the Properties palette... it was showing an External Reference... but it was not visible in the Civil3D window anywhere.  Tried zooming out with the mouse scroll wheel and selecting the entire window to see if some "points" might be highlighted.  Didn't see anything.  Tried the CTRL-A again and zooming back out slowly with mouse to look for any "point" symbols (the little squares).  Still didn't see anything.  But Properties said an External Reference was there.

So you got me thinking.  I went to the window where I had the drawing open... and... yup... State Plane Coordinates (then I recalled this other surveyor regularly works in State Plane).

I drew a line from 5000,5000 to 3057000, 1600000 (near Denver in Colorado Central coordinate system).   Had difficulty zooming in -- no sense of scale.  Went to settings, right clicked on the drawing name > Edit Drawing Settings, and then set the drawing to USA, Colorado, then selected Colorado Central Zone, US FT (...), then under the Geolocation Tab, turned on Map Hybrid.  Colorado Central Zone relief map appears, and I was able to zoom in on the general area... and was able to find the lot survey from there.

I guess the part I don't understand, and that I find frustrating... is that I had done a zoom extents, but even after scrolling out then selecting the entire window, and also trying the CTRL-A technique... I was seeing NO "point" symbols highlighted in the upper right corner of the drawing view window?  So... no hints that something was up there?

Appreciate the help / suggestions.

[camptech]

@ Allen -- I had not tried that.  I went back, created a new drawing, opened the "problem" .dwg, selected everything, and copied it to the clipboard (e.g. CTRL-C).  Went to the new drawing, and pasted it in (CTRL-V).  Yup, everything appeared OK.

[camptech · Accepted solution]

For the person following along from afar, OR pulling their hair out with a similar problem (e.g. Xreferenced drawing attached via 'xattach' not showing up)... it appears that I had a confluence of several factors creating this situation:

1. State Plane Coordinates (or any "other" coordinate system far, far away from where your "expected" locale)
2. A color background that made it very difficult to pick up teeny, tiny point selections.  It turns out that CTRL-A *was* selecting the Xrefernced .dwg, but because of the coordinate system disparity (#1 above), the selected .dwg was a teeny, tiny dot in the far upper right corner of my drawing.  When I zoomed out, I was not seeing the selection because I had been using a "neutral" blue-gray background [ 109, 130, 156 ] which enables me to see lighter colors lines (yellows, cyan etc).  So I was not seeing the Xref selected because of my color background.
3. It turns out I have some "crap" in my base template drawing.  CTRL-A was selecting several items down "near" 0,0.  If I hit <Escape> to clear the selection, and they click + drag that area of the window to highlight those "items"... nothing highlights.  Weird.  I do not understand it.  I unfroze / unhid all layers... still couldn't click+drag to select anything.  What was happening was that "zoom extents" was in fact zooming to the drawing extents, but because of this drawing "garbage" down in the vicinity of 0,0, zoom extents was not zooming in on the xreferenced .dwg.  When I opened a new drawing, CTRL-A'd everything and deleted said "garbage", then xref'd the .dwg again... THEN zoom-extents properly displayed the XREF'd drawing.

In summary... for the fellow hair pulling sufferer, consider the following trouble shooting steps:

1. Check your coordinates / coordinate systems -- are they similar (i.e. in the same "neighborhood"), or vastly different (in a different "galaxy")?  Should they be?
2. If selecting stuff is not showing up... consider temporarily changing your color background ( Options > Display > [ Colors ] )
3. Clean up your drawing template.  CTRL-A selects *everything*, apparently even stuff you cannot select with the mouse.
4. Having a model space devoid of *anything* and *everything* can help troubleshoot xref'ing  / inserting stuff into a blank drawing.  (I used to have default legends down near 0,0 in my template drawing.  I thought I had deleted all that stuff.  I had put them into blocks, but thinking that having legends of blocks as blocks may have been causing my Block Palette grief (described in other posts here abouts), I deleted (or so I thought) all my legends from model space, and purged them from my Block collection, sticking them in separate "Legend .dwg" drawing files.

Hope this documentation may save someone else some time.

[AllenJessup]

Thanks for posting in such detail. One trick I us to find something that I've inserted but doesn't show is:

Command: ZOOM
Specify corner of window, enter a scale factor (nX or nXP), or
[All/Center/Dynamic/Extents/Previous/Scale/Window/Object] <real time>: ob
Select objects: last
1 found