Importing DWG with polylines

I have an Autocad drawing of a man, with the head/arms/legs etc each
drawn as a closed polyline. I am successfully able to import this
drawing into a sketch, but I am not able to do what I want with it. I
am a relative novice using SW, so that is probably the reason.

My intent is to create a sketch (or an assembly) where I can insert
this man into a drawing, and then change the position of his legs, etc
by modifying angle constraints.

In my last attempt, after importing the drawing to one sketch, I
would copy all the objects and then paste them into a new sketch
(named, Head, Neck, etc) and delete the objects I was not using on that
particular sketch. Then I wanted to constrain each sketch of a part so
that its center of rotation would be placed appropriately on the body.
This overall method was not working for me. There was no way to move
an entire sketch as a unit... I guess I am attempting to access them as
though they were AutoCAD blocks.

A more experienced co-worker says that the only possible way to do
this is to go to AutoCAD, and save each individual part of my man as a
separate drawing and then import them one-by-one in to a new part, and
then finally create an assembly from the SW parts.


I understand the logic of this method, but because of its
tediousness, was looking for an alternative. (I do expect to be doing
similar things in the future) Perhaps as I get more experienced I can
write a program to automate the process.

Any recommendations for now?

Joe Dunfee

 

In Acad, move the zero point in the middel of your man(between his

Thank you for the reply. I should add that I have SW ver. 2005. I
had already done the first few steps you suggested, and now have
competed the drawing. But because I suspect I will need to do this on
an ongoing basis, I do want to refine it.

At the moment, I am designing a realistic walrus costume. The actor
will be laying on a rolling base, and his own arms and legs will go
into the walrus's limbs to move the walrus. I have to adjust the
rolling base, the position of the actor, and the size of the walrus to
make everything work.

I finally ended with a very similar process. I had saved each
component of the body as a separate file from AutoCAD. I even went
another step, and moved each component to the origin 0,0,0 in Acad.

In SW, I imported each dwg into a new separate part. But, when I
went to create the assembly, I couldn't get the constraints to work.
Each part of the man has an arc at each end which define the center of
rotation. [sort of like an uneven slot] I could mate the origins by
selecting the + sign at the center of the arc which was coincident with
the origin of that particular part. But, for some reason I could not
select the arc at the other end of the limb. I ended up going to each
individual part drawing, and adding a point at the center of the arcs.
Then I was successful at mating the parts in the SW assembly file.

I constrained each joint by selecting a plane from each part from the
.... the... forgot the name, but it is the list on the left. I can
change the pose by editing this constraint. However this is a bit
cumbersome. I would rather just be able to select and drag the
component I want to move. When I do this, I must highlight the part in
that ??? list on the left, then choose move component. (as opposed to
just click and drag on the component). And when I do move the
component, other components tend to wiggle all over the place, and the
results are entertaining, but not very useful in my design.

Any further ideas on making an easily editable human shape (or
walrus)?

Joe Dunfee