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.
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by camptech. Go to Solution.
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?
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?
Allen Jessup
CAD Manager - Designer
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@ 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.
@ 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.
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:
In summary... for the fellow hair pulling sufferer, consider the following trouble shooting steps:
Hope this documentation may save someone else some time.
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
Allen Jessup
CAD Manager - Designer
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