Inserting a 10 MB DXF file leads to Fusion 360 not responding

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone. I'm trying to insert a DXF file into Fusion 360. I select the file, and then the plan, and then I see the dreaded spinning beach ball. When I look in Activity Monitor, Fusion 360 is responded as "not responding". 

My Fusion 360 version is:

2.0.8609
macOS 10.15.5

I'm hoping someone can help me. I wouldn't like to share the DXF file publicly, but I'm happy to email it to Autodesk if that'll help.

[Phil.E]

Glad to look. You can send it to me at phil dot eichmiller at autodesk dot com. Please refer to this post in your email.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Phil.E. After about 10 minutes, it did open! It's just extremely slow (guess that's to be expected). Thanks.

[Phil.E]

I'm still waiting for it to finish opening. I can tell from the preview that there are 20-30 part representations in this one file. Many of them have borders around them. 

Suggestions:

Import the parts or views one at a time, or at least break it up into multiple dxf.

Use Insert > DXF and then use the dialog to filter the layers. Do not include all the layers if you don't need them.

Thanks for sharing!

[Phil.E]

After isolating one of the layers I have a little more feedback.

If you don't need to extrude, turn off profile display in the sketches, that should help.

However, I'm seeing the text objects are probably massively problematic. This image is a tiny fragment of what each text object is like. What is the intended workflow when using this imported DXF? I ask because it's going to be hard to work with imported data like this in Fusion.

about 1mm of an arc

The line segments that make up this DXF are about 0.003 mm long. Many thousands of them.

It might help to go to the source of the DXF and optimize the output to not include line segments like this.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @Phil.E. That’s essentially what I ended up doing. I opened the DXF in LibreCAD, and “cut” it up in smaller parts, which I exported to DXF and then imported into Fusion 360 without hassle.

Thanks for your help.