Flat Pattern View on Dedicated Drawing Layer

[Ethan Kellough]

Hi there,

I have used Eng-Tips extensively in my academic and professional career. The fact that this is my first post here is a testament to the quality and quantity of knowledge on this forum, and the fact that I have never had a question that hasn't been answered otherwise.

The issue I am having is as such: We are running Creo 2.0 and export all of our drawings as .dxf and .pdf for different applications. We send the .dxf drawings to our plate shop to have parts burned and formed. Currently, practically everything in the drawing is exported on Layer0, other than things associated with default layers, and the plate shop manually removes all the annotations (title block, dimensions, extraneous drawing views etc.) in order to isolate the flat pattern for burning. This is extremely time consuming and costly. The plate shop has informed us that if the flat pattern outline was to be on a dedicated layer, it would be a simple drag-and-drop to nest the .dxfs with their nesting software.

I have managed to put a flat pattern on a new layer by selecting all the lines in the drawing view (New Layer>Include>Click all the lines), but this is tedious and wastes valuable engineering time. Does anyone know of a method or rule than can be applied to put a whole drawing view on a drawing layer at once?

 

[dgallup]

Why not just make a sheet with only the flat pattern view and only export that sheet?

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[looslib]

Drawing views are usually scaled. Why not just export the flat pattern directly, full size, as a DXF and send that to your fab shop. That is what we did and we could then process the cutting to either laser machines are a punch press, depending on the geometry.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[dgallup]

You can not save a solid part as a DXF.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[Ethan Kellough]

Why not just make a sheet with only the flat pattern view and only export that sheet?

Considered that - we use an automated script to export our dxfs and file them properly for rev control etc. At present our IT resources are severely limited so we have a tough time making changes to back-end processes. The script would need to be changed to only export 1 sheet of a drawing. We're looking for something the Engineers can do on the front-end within Creo to isolate the flat pattern on a layer so we can get around having to change our export sequence.

Drawing views are usually scaled. Why not just export the flat pattern directly, full size, as a DXF and send that to your fab shop. That is what we did and we could then process the cutting to either laser machines are a punch press, depending on the geometry.

Our dxf drawings scaled 1:1 when exported, so scaling is not our problem. Unfortunately, our internal processes are not set up to accept a dxf that is just the profile (ex: the dxf drawings are automatically pushed to the supplier with an order, and they need the flat pattern plus the rest of the information in the drawing such as bends and tolerances to make the part).

Any other thoughts about how to isolate a drawing view on a layer? I come from a Solidworks environment and am relatively new to Creo, so I am used to being able to right click on a drawing view and selecting "Change Layer" and it just working. Perhaps this sort of functionality just does not exist in Creo...