DXF Imports. M ark Hannaford P age 1 12

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1 Being able to import DXF files is very handy. This guide covers both methods of bringing DXF data into a Job as a map. Another guide will cover bringing in DTM data as a DXF. Here is my drawing. This is how it has been ed to me: This is the working drawing for a play fort I am building for my children. The coordinated positions refer to 3 x 3 posts sunk into the ground. Rather than use two tapes, I have decided to use a TS16 and CS20 combination. Well, you would, wouldn t you? This project will be used for the rest of these guides. The purpose of this guide is not to teach you how AutoCAD works. It is a very deep program with many different versions. I will cover the absolute basics required to edit the above.dwg drawing into something that can be used. No guarantees can be given for these CAD edits. The main reason for editing the file, is to get the size down as much as possible. Captivate hardware has much faster processors and more memory to play with than ever before. That is still no reason to block up the job with data and information we will never need. As an example, I once attended site to look at a TCRP1205+ that crashed when trying to upload a customer s data. When I got to site and looked at the data, he was trying to upload a huge housing site drawing. Not only did it show individual rooms in each house and kitchen appliances complete with rings on the cookers but, if you managed to zoom right in, the drawing even had the screws (Phillips head) holding down the rings on the cookers shown. The whole drawing was around a Gig and a half! Unsurprisingly, the poor old data logger struggled to upload it and display even a small part of the data! The chap only wanted to set out the house corners and road channels! I will now perform some simple edits to prepare my drawing. There are many different ways to achieve the same results. As this is such a small, simple drawing, I am going to delete the layers and detail that I do not require: First off, go to File, Save as and save the drawing using a different name. This will mean you don t edit (and ruin for others) the original drawing. I usually stick with the original name and add _UPLOAD to it. For a small drawing such as this, it is as quick to simply delete the layers that we do not need. Most AutoCAD drawing will have been drawn using layers. Think of layers as individual sheets of transparent paper each with a different element of the whole M ark Hannaford P age 1 12

2 drawing on each layer. So, there will be building on a layer, roads on a layer and drainage on another, etc. Click the Layers icon (or type _layer into the Command box) and make all the layers visible. Now, freeze or switch off only the layers that are required to upload and click OK. You can now erase the whole drawing as it appears on screen. Now type _layer again and switch on or thaw the layers we need. Click OK and the drawing as we need it will hopefully appear. Tidy up any odd details by using the Erase (type e) command. The problem now is that all those (now empty) layers we deleted are still defined in the drawing. Type the word purge into the Command line and press Enter. Click the Purge All option. Type _layer again and now you should only see the layers that you have selected to upload. Try to keep these to a minimum if the drawing is large. Click OK. I am also going to erase the front view of the fort. I do not need this to set out the points. I am going to keep the dimension notes though. In order to upload, the drawing must be saved as a DXF. Click File and select Save as. Look for Files of type: and click the drop down arrow. Scroll towards the bottom of the list to find the.dxf options. I tend to find the earlier versions are more reliable. Save the drawing as a DXF. Here are the results of the edits made: All of the data not actually needed to set out has been removed. The empty layers have been purged out of the drawing and we have saved it as a DXF. The file is now ready to upload. I am going to use a USB memory stick to upload the file. Once the memory device has been inserted into any Captivate hardware, all the folders ever needed will have been automatically created. These folders are shown here. It is the circled Data folder that we must put the prepared DXF file into. Simply copy and paste the file into the Data folder itself. Do not worry about the sub-folders. Eject the USB device. Insert it into the Captivate handset. We can now upload the file. We shall look at the two methods of upload. First, the straight forward Import option. M ark Hannaford P age 2 12

3 1 The job I am going to be importing the DXF into has already been created. With that job at the centre of the job list as shown, simply tap the job tile. 2 Select Import data from the list. M ark Hannaford P age 3 12

4 3 Select DXF from the options list. 4 If like me, you are using a USB stick to upload the file, you must make sure the From device line at the top is set to USB stick. You will then be able to tap the From file option and select the file you are uploading as I have done here. My DXF is called fort_upload. To job should be shown as the job in Stage 1. You can change that if you wish. Before we upload, we need to check the settings. Press the green Fn key or tap the Fn option as circled. Press F1 (Settings). M ark Hannaford P age 4 12

5 5 An important screen! The first three lines define the prefix for points/features imported from the DXF. The first point imported will have the ID Pt_1. This will help distinguish it from any other points already called 1 in the job. If your drawing has been supplied by the designer/architect in millimetres rather than metres, you can use the Units used within.dxf file settings to allow for this. See Notes. Create points at the vertices of lines is also very important. If it is ticked, Captivate will create points wherever it can! In reality, this certainly means at each end of every line. In CAD, often the end of one line is also the start of another. You can very easily end up with thousands of points! As we shall see later, there is another way! This one tick box now controls point creation on each import method. You will need to check this screen whichever method you use to import the data. Press F1 (OK). 6 You will find yourself back to this screen. With the settings as selected in Stage 5, the DXF file will be imported into the job and as many points created as possible. This means on my example, we shall end up with more points importing than we actually want to use. If the Create points at the vertices of lines box is not ticked, the DXF will still import but the points will not be created at the ends of the lines. With everything ready, press F1 (OK). M ark Hannaford P age 5 12

6 7 The file will now import and this little report will be generated. As you can see, a total of 58 points have been imported. This is far more than the number of upright post positions shown in the coordinate table on the first page. The line that is disappearing out of the bottom of the report states, 15 Lines imported. With the data imported, this part of the guide is complete. Press F4 (No) to answer the hidden question of whether we want to import more data. Before we look at the second method of importing a DXF, let s look at what we imported The screen on the left shows us the list of points. You can see the Pt_ prefix assigned to the imported points as per the settings in Stage 5. Of more interest is the screen of the 3D viewer on the right. Yes, the key points listed in the coordinate table on the original drawing have been imported. Note that the Point IDs do not match the original coordinate table. So too have all the points at the end of lines of the fort itself. These might prove useful. Look above the fort and you will see the text box has also had the lines forming it imported! However, where has the text itself disappeared? This sums up the drawbacks of importing DXF data like this. Lack of control over the points and any text is compressed out of the file. There is however, an alternative method M ark Hannaford P age 6 12

7 1 This is my preferred method of importing DXF data into a job. Rather than physically importing the file, it is instead attached to the job. It works in much the same way as an X- Ref (External Reference) works in AutoCAD. You can actually attach the file when you create a new job in much the same way as shown here. I am going to attach it to an existing job. With the DXF copied into the Data folder and the USB stick inserted into the port located at the bottom of the CS20 we are ready to go. From the Home page, tap the selected job. 2 Frome the list, select View & edit job properties. M ark Hannaford P age 7 12

8 3 Recognise this? Of course you do! These are the same tabs you see when creating a new job in Captivate. General is the page that would display the job name, Codelist is where you select the codes you are going to use, etc, etc. On this screen, I have used F6 (Page) to highlight the CAD files page, (with a due nod to Edith Pargeter!). This page is empty at the moment because as yet no files are attached to the job. Press F2 (Add) to address this lack of attached files! 4 Captivate will now list each and every DXF file it can find. The handy thing is that you do not need to specify where the DXF is located. Captivate will look in the Data folder of every memory media it can find. You can see from the screen I have just tapped the tick box which is now shown as selected. You can scroll through the units options by pressing F2 (Unit) if you drawing has not been drawn in metres. Press F2 (Store). M ark Hannaford P age 8 12

9 5 This screen then confirms which files are to be attached. Press F1 (Store) and once the file has imported, you will be returned to the Home screen. Let s have a look at the data and compare it to the Import method. 6 I have gone straight to the 3D Viewer. The Points list tab is empty! Captivate has attached the drawing to the job but hasn t yet physically created any points. Compare this view to the Map of the data shown on page 6. The drawing looks more or less the same as it did in CAD. The distance check table is still there. If we were importing a proper drawing perhaps with man hole cover IDs in text next to each position. The fact the text is there and you know you are setting out Storm 17 might be all important. All very nice I m sure you re thinking. What use is the drawing other than as a background image? The next stage is to bring in individual points and lines as we need them. We can do that now whilst in the 3D Viewer. M ark Hannaford P age 9 12

10 7 I have already started the process of selecting my first series of points and lines. It is easy to see that I have selected the large central square of the fort. The line has thickened considerably to show it has been selected. The fat red line off to the left is supposed to represent the stylus! All you have to do to select an object is tap it once. Slightly less obvious is the fact I have also tapped on the three points at along the top of the fort. If you look carefully, you can see that the dots now representing the points are slightly heavier/larger. It is easier to spot in Captivate itself. Now tap and hold one of the selected features. 8 Because we have selected both a line and some points, the dropdown menu that appears is limited to only two options. If we had imported only a line for example, you would have an Information option that would allow you to preview the number of vertices and length of the line. There would also be Layer settings. See Notes. Tap Import and the lines and points you have selected will be imported. Important Note: Look at the screen shown in Stage 5 on Page 5. That tick box titled Create points at the vertices of lines, is where you control what happens here as well. The Viva Config settings are gone! I have left that box ticked here so we should get points at the end of the lines as well as the line. Tap Import as circled. M ark Hannaford P age 10 12

11 9 I have just managed to catch the information bar at the top of the screen with my screen grab! It states 9 points & 1 line imported. You can also see the Point ID labels. I selected the three pile positions first and then the line. Captivate has labelled the points in the order I selected them which is very handy indeed. You can see the CAD labels match the Pt_ label. All the points will be listed in the Points tab and are now ready to set out. Notes: There are many ways to prepare data in AutoCAD. By far the best way is to get someone else to do it! That is what designers and architects are paid to do! If in any doubt at all, ask! Although the scale can be adjusted in Captivate via the Units option, it is safer all round to get the designer to supply the drawing you want in metres. Designers work in mm so they do not have to use the decimal point (.) when entering distances. Changing the scale in CAD is quick and easy and will cut down possible confusion if you have to give your data to another engineer. Newer versions of CAD seem to let you copy and paste parts of a drawing and retain the original coordinates. This hasn t always been the case. If you are stuck, try the command W (Write block) in CAD and have a play around with that. I have mentioned it a couple of times but it seems the Settings screen on Page 5 is now the only way to control whether points on lines or lines only are imported. The extra page in the Map/Config settings has sadly disappeared. OK, I have done all that but cannot select or import any of the points or lines! This scenario can happen especially on hire equipment. If the folks who had the kit before you had a play with the settings Here is how to fix the problem. Whilst in M ark Hannaford P age 11 12

12 the 3D Viewer screen as shown in the last stage above, press the green Fn key. Then press F4 (Layers). You will be presented with the following screen: Your screen will not of course look exactly like this one. This is a list of the layers that make up my drawing. This is how you want your screen to look. Each of the layers have their State set to Selectable. Press F5 (State) to scroll through the options until Selectable is set. Then press F1 (Store) to save the settings and exit back to the 3D Viewer. The other options are Visible; meaning you will be able to see the layer but not select it and Hidden; meaning it is there but will not appear on the drawing. These three basic settings mean that you could set only the layers you need to set out as Selectable and the rest as Visible. This will avoid the accidental creation of points you do not require. Once you have set the layers as you wish, press F1 (Store). By attaching the DXF as outlined in the second part of this guide, you open the way to allow you to remove the DXF from the job. This can obviously be very useful. It might for example, allow you to remove a drawing and replace it with a later revision. Any points and lines you have imported will remain. To do this, simply tap the job name from the Home menu and select View & edit job properties. Page across to the CAD files tab and, with the DXF file highlighted, press F4 (Remove). A confirmation message will appear. This guide was written using a Version 1.30 PC Simulator. M ark Hannaford P age 12 12