ORION 18: HOW TO IMPORT AUTOCAD DRAWINGS INTO ORION

If you already have a building drawing from AutoCAD but want to continue your design in Orion 18, here is how you will go about it.

Step 1

Convert the drawing from the original DWG format in AutoCAD to DXF file format. To do that, Open the drawing in AutoCAD, then click 'File' and select 'Save As'. In the 'Save Drawing As' dialog box that appears, Choose  'AutoCAD 2013 DXF (.dxf)' (or any other .dxf format) from the 'Files of Type' list. For this tutorial, I'm going to import an old drawing plan I named 'Drawing1' into Orion. Click 'Save'.

Step 2

Open the Orion 18 software, Click 'External Reference Drawing' in the member's toolbar at the top of the screen.
                 

In the 'Reference Drawing Settings' dialog box that appears, tick the 'Display Reference Drawing ' box, then click 'Load'. From the 'Load DXF file' dialog box, select the saved 'Drawing1', then click 'Open' to import the file into Orion. Wait, then select the unit of import as 'mm' when the dialog box for units appears and click 'OK'. The drawing appears as below.

Step 3

As we can see, the drawing is not well positioned in the drawing area. Next, we move it to be well positioned within the drawing area. To do so, Click 'Move' in the 'Reference Drawing Settings' dialog box that is still open, hover on the drawing then click a point on the drawing when the red 'X' appears (here I click the top left corner of the drawing) and drag it to position the drawing better.

Step 4

The drawing is now better positioned but still too big. To reduce its size to fit into the drawing area, we type  scale factor of '0.65' into the box above 'Scale', then click 'Scale'. The drawing is now fitting better into the drawing area.

Step 5

Now we will import our columns and axis into the drawing area.

Click 'Import Members' in the 'Reference Drawing Settings' dialog box. Tick the boxes for 'Import Axes' and 'Import Columns'. Select the layers for the axes and column. Click 'OK'. 

NB: For axes and columns to be imported;

1. They must be made of straight lines and closed polylines respectively in the AutoCAD drawing.
2. They need separate 'column' and 'axes' layers in the DXF file. For axes, it may be 2 layers ('Dir-1' and 'Dir-2' for the layers having the horizontal and vertical axes respectively.) If all the axes are on only one layer, this layer should be set as Dir-1 and Dir-2 set as 'None'. Using 'Group by Axis Directions' option ignores this command and groups the axes solely by their angles.

If the model check doesn't have any error, close it to view the axes and columns in the drawing area as seen below, with the axes and columns.