Converting splines to arcs

[bennett71]

Does anyone know if its possible to convert splines to arcs in Auto cad or any other program? I am using Meta cam (mc diamond soft) for laser tooling & this program does not like splines. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ger21]

Use one of the free spline to polyline lisps. Then, using pedit, use the fit option which will fit arc segments to the polyline. Explode into arcs, and if you need a polyline, you can use pedit again to join it back into a polyline composed of the arcs.

[bennett71]

Gerry,

Thanks for the tip, I will try it out. I also stumbled on the wmfout/wmfin command. This converts to windows metafile & with wmfin the splines are imported as polys. I will try it tonight & see how it works.

[ger21]

Originally Posted by bennett71 I also stumbled on the wmfout/wmfin command. This converts to windows metafile & with wmfin the splines are imported as polys. I will try it tonight & see how it works.

Saving as .v12 .dxf will do the same thing. Just save as v12 .dxf, close the drawing, and open the .dxf.

[josteurs]

True, you can "save as" your autocad as an pre release 12 version which wil than change your spline into line and arc segments. newer CNC software usualy don't have a problem with splines

[klrskies]

Im useing Mechanical 2010. Thanks for the tip! When I use the v12.dxf save, and get a 3d polyline, its broken into many, many tiny line segments. Can I convert it into a lower resolution group of lines and or better yet, arcs so I dont have so many entities?

[JMaeding]

note that the flatten command converts splines to plines, its not documented but works. Flatten also sets z coordinate vals to 0 so watch what you are doing.