We've enhanced the Drawing health commands in BricsCAD V24 to help you keep your DWG files healthy and improve performance. These commands are available in all BricsCAD licenses and will help you thoroughly clean up your drawing data.
BricsCAD features a unique set of drawing optimization tools - some of which you may already be familiar with from previous BricsCAD releases - like the PURGE command and AUDIT tool. Last year, we introduced a new drawing health tool to make it easier for you to access these optimization tools from one place in BricsCAD.
The Drawing Health tool groups these optimization tools into a single, powerful, and easy-to-use command. Our users gave us plenty of positive feedback about the Drawing Health tool, so we have developed the tool further. We added a new task corresponding to the OVERKILL command, enhanced routine management to allow multi-imports and exports, and made the result panel more interactive.
Let's look at an example of an unhealthy 2D terrain drawing to show you how to use the Drawing Health tool to your advantage.
How to launch the Drawing Health Management tool in BricsCAD® V24
You can launch the Drawing Health Management tool from multiple places in BricsCAD, like the command line using DWGHEALTH and from the Ribbon like in this example.
• Navigate to the "Manage" tab on the Ribbon to reveal the panel of drawing optimization tools
You'll see the Drawing Health tool in the middle of the panel.
We have revamped the interface of the Drawing Health tool in BricsCAD V24. The new Drawing Health tasks now contain the name of the individual drawing optimization tool to which it corresponds.
Creating and managing routines has also been made simpler.
• To tweak some of BricsCAD's out-of-the-box routines, use the "Edit" button.
• To open the dialog, use the "Manage Routine" button.
In the Manage Routines Dialog, you can edit, rename, duplicate, export, or delete an existing routine.
At the bottom of the command panel, you can toggle the "Interactive mode" switch on or off, so drawing help will either run entirely automatically or will allow you to make some input into the routine to achieve your desired result.
How to create an optimization routine for 2D drawings in BricsCAD® V24
This example begins with an unhealthy 2D drawing of some terrain. Before you start editing, you need to assess the drawing's quality to see what can be improved.
Using the structure browser, you can see that this drawing contains thousands of entities on different layers. You can see some complex polylines when we zoom in, like on the left in this drawing.
If you look at the properties panel, you can see that this polyline contains over 16,000 vertices.
Let's make this drawing lighter with some drawing optimization tools.
• To create a new routine, open the Drawing Health dialog and click the "Create new" button.
• In the Custom Settings dialog, click the "Add task" button.
• Add a Purge task to purge unused entities from the drawing for this example.
• Add an Audit task to detect any potential errors in the database.
• Choose Find Outliers to identify faraway objects and move them to coordinates within the valid area.
• Add the Simplify command to simplify 2D geometry and remove redundant vertices and high-density polylines.
• Add the new Overkill task to reduce repetition to identify duplicate geometry and block definitions in the database.
How to explore task settings
You can then explore the settings of each task you added to the routine.
• In the Simplify task settings, choose the "Reduce vertices" option in the distance mode and set the maximum angle to 2 degrees and the maximum distance to 1 meter.
You can save the routine or try it out to continue quicker and without saving it. In this example, we chose to try it out. You can see that BricsCAD lists the selected tasks in the command panel.
How to optimize a drawing in in BricsCAD® V24
Now it's time to inspect and optimize the drawing!
You can see that the PURGE task has identified many unused objects - including six block definitions, indicating no block references in the drawing pointing to these definitions. We can also see that there are four unused text styles.
• Click the "Next" button in the command panel to apply all the selected optimizations.
Next is the AUDIT task - luckily, this drawing has no database errors.
The FINDOUTLIERS task quickly shows that the entire drawing's geometry is far from the valid region.
If you look at the command panel, you can see a large cluster of outliers - when you zoom in, you can see that these are in the main drawing.
To move all the listed entities to the valid region:
• Click "Select all."
• Click on the four arrows button.
• Click "Move to valid region origin."
• Click "Next."
You can see that all the geometry is now located within the valid region.
The Simplify task has identified over fifty polylines that you can simplify. When we zoom in, you can see the polyline we noticed earlier.
• Click "Next" to simplify all selected polylines.
The next task in our routine is new to V24 - the Overkill for duplicate geometry task. This example presented us with a long list of duplicate entities. You can easily find overlapping objects by zooming in.
The OVERKILL command not only finds overlapping objects but also finds partially overlapping entities.
In this example, it has identified two aligned, colinear lines that you can join together.
• Click "Next" to join the lines.
The Overkill task for duplicate block definitions shows us that five duplicate blocks are present in the drawing.
• Use the drop-down to choose which block definition you want to keep or remove.
• Click "Next" to execute the task.
Looking at the command panel now, you will see an overview of all the optimizations you've made to the drawing.
• To save your report for future reference, check the "Save report" box at the bottom of the panel.
• Click "Finish," and you have completed the drawing health routine!
There's plenty more in BricsCAD V24, so watch our Breakout Sessions for an in-depth look at some of these new features!
Watch the video!
Watch the Breakout Session over on the Bricsys YouTube channel to see the BricsCAD V24's Drawing Health Management tools in action!
Want to learn more about BricsCAD® V24?
If you're curious about what else you can do in BricsCAD V24, check out our YouTube channel or take a peek at the rest of the Bricsys blog to learn more!
Have you used BricsCAD® V24 and have some ideas or suggestions?
Fantastic! We love hearing your thoughts on BricsCAD® – all feedback is welcome, whether good or bad. The best way to tell us what you think about BricsCAD is to send us a support request; our support team will gladly help.
Get started with BricsCAD® V24 today!
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