AutoCAD - Entities invisible after igesin

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Entities invisible after igesin

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Forum Name: AutoCAD
Forum Description: Discussion about AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, viewers, DWG and DWF formats, Design Review, AutoCAD 360, add-ons
URL: https://www.cadforum.cz/forum_en/forum_posts.asp?TID=5289
Printed Date: 29.Apr.2026 at 10:42

Topic: Entities invisible after igesin

Posted By: dlemr
Subject: Entities invisible after igesin
Date Posted: 08.Feb.2011 at 17:52

When I "IGESIN" and particular iges file, many of the entities are tagged as "invisible". I cannot "see" or access them in any way. They are resident in the drawing. When I do a "LIST", "ALLl", I can see the word "invisible" in the entitiy definition screen, next to each entity. But, it does not have an attribute assigned next to the word "invisible" so I cannot access it thru lisp. I have tried all of the option available from the "IGESIN" command, but nothing changes. Any ideas?

Replies:

Posted By: CarlB
Date Posted: 08.Feb.2011 at 20:02

What type of entities are these? Are they 3d faces or meshes, with all lines/edges set to invisible?

You should be able to access them via lisp by stepping through all entities in the drawing datatbase.

Posted By: dlemr
Date Posted: 08.Feb.2011 at 21:46

The entities can be anything: lines, circles, faces/meshes, etc. The problem seems to be universal to the IGES file that I am trying to import. After insertion, there are 126,000 entities resident in the drawing(it is an 80 MB file of a stamping die), but they are all flagged as "invisible". All Layers are "on", "unlocked", "unfrozen".

Other IGES files that I import the same way are fine.

My gut feeling is that maybe a particular system variable in Autocad is controlling it, but I cannot determine which variable. I've only encountered this problem with more recent versions of Autocad's IGES translator.

"HELP" is useless, of course. It referrred me to the Block Editor. This file does not contain any "blocks".

I've worked with Acad since Rel. 9 and I'm very fluent with it. I would attempt to access them via lisp (entmod ?), but I do not know which handle is controlling the "invisible" condition.

This particular problem has me "stumped", though.

Also, I assume that the original IGES file is not corrupted. I do not recevie any error messages.

Posted By: HAWDesigner
Date Posted: 08.Feb.2011 at 22:27

Which AutoCAD version are you currently using?

Other than what I've recently read, I don't know much about IGES. I did notice that Autodesk apparently had issues and removed the IGESIN and IGESOUT commands after the 2006 or 2007 version.

I also noticed that they added the new [CMD]IGESIMPORT[/CMD] and [CMD]IGESEXPORT[/CMD] commands back into the 2011 version.

I'm thinking they had unresolved issues with the old versions of the commands, and that's why they were removed.

Other than that, I was also unable to find any solution to your problem. You might have better luck with the new 2011.

Good Luck!!

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R. Williams
AutoCAD 2010 Certified Professional

<<AutoCAD 2009

Posted By: dlemr
Date Posted: 11.Feb.2011 at 16:45

I've got Inventor 2008 loaded. The IGES translator seems to function better in Mechanical Desktop than in (just) Autocad.

You have a good point. Maybe it is an internal software glitch with this particular IGES translator.

I will attempt to translate using another 3rd party translator. The file is so big that it drags my system down.

Thanks for the feedback.

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