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Peter11-Visitor
1-Visitor
July 30, 2012
Question

Export DWG Drawing with Converted Splines to Arcs

  • July 30, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 2852 views

Hello all,

A very common task in my job is to export a Creo Drawing to a 2D DWG. This drawing has datum curves, no solid models, that are made up of splines and other entities.

The probelm is that the factories that reads these drawings usually pulls in the Spline Shapes as Polylines because that is what I am outputting from the export dialogs. This is not ideal because they need the spline into arcs to properlly run the CNC machines. I can export as Splines, but I think they will still have issues with that as well.

I have searched for solutions or software, but does anyone know how to convert Splines to Arcs easily? I have laid out Arcs over the splines in the model and that is a decent approximation, but not perfect.

We need to keep the spline flexibility but get the easier to use 2D output for the factories/CNC and Graphic Designers that use Illustrator.

Thanks a lot!


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1 reply

J
James621-Visitor
1-Visitor
July 31, 2012

hi Peter,

I use the same method for our wire cut EDMs. With polylines the output code gets too huge sometimes that the machines can't read it. That's when I replace the splines with arcs manually.

Our CNC machinists use SurfCAM for programming which can handle the spline curves.

The best solution to either buy more capable manufacturing software or tell the designers of the initial models to use splines only when necesarry so these problems don't propagate into the production as much.

~Jakub

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