dwg's for US fish and wildlife

[Anonymous]

Has any one dealt with conversions to DWG for US fish and wildlife? They seem to have a very specific format that is all autocad based. I can save to DWG, but can not be sure about meeting autocad fills linetypes CBT Tabls etc. Any help would be appreciated. I would hate to have to grovel at the heels of the Autocad gods..

[Rick Thompson]

I'm sorry, I have no answer, but that is the best line about plan reviewers I have read in a long time. They are a tough lot. There was one guy in Atlanta that would send plans back over and over.. and redline his own changes from the first relined set. Finally he was caught for embezzlement.

Good luck with the fish guys. My brother was one for 30 years. I do know one ex-engineer from IN Fish and Wildlife. I'll pass this on to him and see if he has any suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Yeah I was a PLan reviewer for about 4 years, Got laid off so it's back to the grind stone, The cad standards unfortunately are very specific, I have to wonder how much Autocad paid to be the government go to software. They defiantly are not making it easy for none Autocad companies.

[Anonymous]

a second question, is there a package of Autocad standard Linetypes, text and fills for Archicad? That alone would help

[Aaron Bourgoin]

The Canadian Federal government also has a very complex CAD standard. They actually send someone out to assist firms with compliance. Do you think F&W would do the same for you? It is their dataset they are adding to and seems to me they would be the ones to explain it.

On one large project we were able to build a translator to do most of the work from within ArchiCAD.

To complete the task, we bought a cheap ($30?) add-in for AutoCad called Multi-Batch. This is a macro creation tool and it allowed us to audit, adjust and tweak each drawing for conformance.

[Karl Ottenstein]

F&W should provide you with a dwg that contains their standards. By using that file as a 'template' within the dwg translator, you can more easily construct a translator for your project - at least as far as mapping your layer names into their layer names, pens, fonts, AC linetype to AutoCAD linetype conversion table, Fill to Hatch conversion table, etc.

When you have a complete dwg from them as a template, building a translator becomes much easier because it is all an issue of filling in drop-down lists.

Cheers,
Karl

[Aaron Bourgoin]

related. posted today: http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2009/01/autocad-layer-translator.html