Plant 3D – Bind Xrefs to AutoCAD for export

In plant You may have encountered the following issue,

That when you are trying to export a plant 3D AutoCAD drawing to a normal AutoCAD drawing,

various references that you had Xref’ed in are now missing,

This is because the conversion process normally dumps out reference data.

to rectify this issue, all we need to do, is to change the drawings from being an xref to being directly inserted into the current drawing.

You can do this but manually copying the drawing data from the reference drawing across to the destination drawing by just using the normal copy paste though this does require a reference point,

 

There is an alternative option here and that is to use the bind option within the xref palette,

To do this, open the drawing that you wish to have all the xrefs merged into.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open the External Reference Pallet,

Then right click on the reference you wish to merge with the current drawing.

On the menu that pops up, select the Bind… Option.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bind Xrefs and underlays menu opens,

And we are presented with two options,

We can either band or insert,

If we choose the bind option, it will insert the xref into the drawing as a block but keep everything on unique layers by adding prefixes,

if we choose the insert option, it will then insert the xref, also as a block, though any similar layers will merge,

which one you chose is up to what suits your needs.

normally I choose the bind option.

Once done click OK.

 

 

 

 

The drawing should now have been inserted and you can explode the block for the individual components.

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