I guess I am not the only person in the world who received 3D models which are not created in Autodesk products. Many times in these cases the model is far from optimal. It consists of huge number of 3D faces or surfaces.
This causes huge problems, the 3D model itself will became huge. Even maneuvering in the model will be painfully slow. Not to mention the 2D view generation for orthographic drawings. This is true for both Plant3D and Inventor. Your target should be having a model which only consists of solid parts or solid bodies.
In Autocad whatever I have tried it was impossible to convert these kind of surfaces to solids.
What I found as the best workflow is the following:
- open the .dwg in “import” mode
- make sure that you include surfaces too for the importation
- in Inventor use the SCULPT function to generate one big solid
- export the Inventor part to .dwg
- open the newly created .dwg in Autocad
- use the SEPARATE function to explode the one big solid to multiple ones
After this procedure you will have a dwg file which contains only solids. As a result this file then can be used with ease in Plant3D or if you work in Inventor it can be opened there and the imported file will be a nice assembly with multiple parts containing only solid geometry or one part with multiple bodies depending on you import settings.
If you convert these surface-type models into solids in both Autocad and Inventor you will save a huge amount of computing time. Maybe my method is not the easiest or the most straight forward version, but for the models I usually receive it works like a charm. However if you have any better solution, please let me know.
In conclusion you can find the full method to covert surfaces to solids in video format here:
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