There is a "2D to 3D" toolbar that will help you with the process, but your time would probably be better served by remaking the file in 3D and using the 2D printout as a guide.

Scott Baugh, CSWP
CAD Systems Manager
Evapar
www.evapar.com

Quote:

"If it's not broke, Don't fix it!"

FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

I converted the exterior and interface surfaces of a 12 cylinder natural gas engine from 2D DWG to 3D SW using SW2010's suite of 2Dto3D tools. It was rather fun, once I got the hang of it, though not as easy as one might hope.

The process caused me to discover rather quickly that the 2D drawings had been, uh, simplified, to put it politely, and some views that would have been useful to me were just not present. Luckily I had access to an actual similar engine to fill in the missing information and to figure out what some of the odd lines might have been intended to represent.

I think it's worth your time to run through the associated tutorial a few times, just to get a feel for what you can expect




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

As Mike Said! Read the help files and go trough the tutorials because you can place the sketch of each view in the right place and use it to extrude to a point on the other view and so on. It's a bit of work but if you don't need to make changes to the model after then I think it will be faster that way. But if you need to make some changes to the model you should start over from scratch.

Patrick

I found it helpful to go through the SW Tutorials at least three times, for several reasons:
- You are executing the tutorial in the first place to learn something new; I never get new concepts in one reading.
- The SW designers/authors/engineers/programmers have a particular Gallic way of thinking and of doing things. There's nothing wrong with that, but it may not parallel the way you think.
- I get the impression that SW is written in French (logical enough), and translated to English, usually a little better than machine translation does it, but not always a lot better.
- At the time I was using SW2010, the tutorials were more closely associated with SW2007 or SW2005. I.e., they didn't update the tutorials with every new issue of SW, and that caused a lot of confusion, because they seemed to regularly change the menu structure, the artwork, the specific terminology used, and the behavior of the software, i.e. everything _but_ the tutorials, regularly/continuously. I'm getting rusty, but I see no sign here that that tradition has changed.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA