Import logo from Adobe Illustrator

I am doing a project now for a customer that wants his logo embossed on the
part. He gave me with a .pdf file of his logo. It is basically very fancy
text with lots of loopity-loops and such. I need to get this logo into a
sketch so that I can extrude it.

I first tried to save it as a graphics image and use WinTopo to create the
geometry. This failed. The geometry wasn't even close to being usable.

I then called the graphics designer directly. She uses Adobe Illustrator.
She told me that she could export it as a .dxf or .dwg though she had never
done this before.

The first attempt produced nothing but crosshatch when opened in AutoCAD,
and absolutely nothing when imported into SolidWorks.

She found some export settings or something and re-exported.

This time it opened perfect in AutoCAD, but only about 50% of the entities
(splines) would import into SW. I got this error message:
Entity not imported, type Spline, Handle: 8C
Entity not imported, type Spline, Handle: 86
Entity not imported, type Spline, Handle: 7F
Entity not imported, type Spline, Handle: 79
etc.
etc.

I know nothing about Adobe Illustrator. And she knows nothing about
exporting it to CAD. Does anyone know of a way that I could get this done?
I am all out of ideas.

TIA

 

This is what I'd try.
Open in autocrap, select all and explode
keep doing this until there's nothing left to explode.
Save, open back up then purge all then save , close
open back up, purge all, save ,close
Keep doing this until there's nothing left to purge.
Export as dxf then try to import into SW SLDDRW.
If that works then try to copy /paste into sketch
Not sure if It'd work. but that's what I'd try
Cheers
Frank

 

Frank,

I had interesting results doing this.

Before, there were 17 splines that wouldn't import which made up approx.
70-80% of the geometry. So I only got around 20-30% actual good geometry.

After exploding as you suggested, there were 72 splines that didn't import.
But since there was a LOT more splines to start with, that still left about
80-90% of the geometry that DID import. I think I may be able to fudge the
last 10-20% by tracing over a sketch picture.

To trace the whole image would have taken days. This at least reduces that
time to a somewhat tolerable level.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to remember that...

 

That does work. I saved it as R12 dxf. But there were so many lines that
it brought SW to its knees.

I tried to window select all of the lines in the sketch. I sat there and
waited about 4-5 minutes as all of the lines turned green one by one. I did
get a pop-up message that I had never seen before in the 8 years I have been
using SW. It said: "Not all of the large number of entries can be listed".
I figure there must have been many thousand lines in the sketch.

This would probably work great on smaller geometry. Oh well. Back to the
"drawing" board...

 

Here's the trick to make it work Seth. Open the version 12 drawing in
AutoCAD. Once open type PEDIT at the command line. Type "M" ENTER to
select multiple entities. Window select the entire drawing. When asked to
convert to poly lines say YES and Enter. Next Hit "J" and ENTER to join all
the lines. Input a "fuzz distance". I usually use .06 but you may need
something different. Hit Enter and let it do it's thing. When done save
the drawing. What you just did was turn everything in to poly lines, closed
99% of the gaps and connected all the poly lines together.

Now open this drawing into a part file in SW. When doing this set the merge
points option to a low number like .01. It should open with out problems
and you should have closed contours for extruding. If not you can use the
sketch tools to show you where the holes are. There should only be a couple
if any. I regularly do this with dwg files that have thousands of line
entities with no problems. Let me know if you need more help.

Rob

 

I did try this. It processed for around 40 minutes and never finished. I
needed my machine back so I had to end the task before completing. I will
try this again today just before I leave work so that I can let it process.

By the way, I assume the "fuzz distance" of .06 is metric. I entered .002
for inches (should be about the same).

FYI - There are about 58000 lines in this logo drawing after exploding
everything.

 

Seth,

Download a demo of rhino and use it's arcfit command (under edit menu - I
forget exactly what it's called) it will 'trace' the splined version of your
dxf with a series of tangent arcs. Or just use rhino to extrude/model
whatever 3d features you want for the logo and import these into sw to use
as toolbodies.

Or as Dale suggested - extrude the closed shapes in autocad to primitive
solids then import these into solidworks, you can use these solids as
toolbodies or just create sketches from the faces.

Save out the logo as a tif or bitmap and use a raster to vector program
(flexisign has a good one) to convert in 100% closed splines. (Helps
simplify the geometry without losing the shape, also works great for clipart
which is always got overlapping sections)

Also, a vastly overlooked autocad tool: part of the express tools is
called 'overkill' at the command line, I think the menu item is called
'find duplicates' or something, it is similiar to multi pedit but does a
lot more and works very well.

Also, if you have access to mdt (mechanical desktop) it has a spline to
pline command on the surfacing toolbar.

Zander

 

As my I.D. days get further and further behind me, it gets harder to
remember these things.

If you have access to Adobe Illustrator, then you may be able to do
some editing to prepare for the export. Crosshatches? There is no
need for filled blocks. Create outlines and remove block shapes. Make
sure there are no entities on hidden layers. Convert text to shapes
and keep only outlines.

Also, there may be a way in Illustrator to change splines to simething
more friendly. That, or just brute-force redraw in Illustrator.

Worst case scenario: Ghostscript can convert the PDF to TIFF or BMP,
and you trace.

 

This time it opened perfect in AutoCAD,


Ok, from acad, save it as an R12 DXF

Now open the DXF in *Notepad*
Search down from the top of the file for the word "ENTITIES" ,
without the quotation marks.

There will be 3 lines before it:
0
SECTION
2

erase every line ABOVE THAT ZERO to the beginning of the file
(starting with "ENDSEC" in the line above the sero.)

Save and retry reading in with your fav cad or cam app.

 

Man!!! All these possible solutions, and I have since gotten temporarily
pulled off this project to work on a different hot, hot project. I will
give some of these a try in the next day or two.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

 

Just to let everyone know,

Brian Mears helped me out with this problem by taking the Adobe Illustrator
(.ai) file and running it through a program called Bezarc. It produced
perfect CAD data without a single spline in the geometry. Instead, the
sketch consists of lines and arcs only which simplifies the data a LOT and
still looks just like the logo.

From what I have seen, I am going to purchase a seat of Bezarc. If you also
have a need to get data from an Illustrator document, I highly recommend it
for you as well.

I would like to thank everyone again for your input and ideas. I am sure
that several of these solutions would have worked to some degree or another.
But I doubt any of them would have produced better quality than Brian did
with the Bezarc program.

This group is great!