The overkill command
Saturday, June 04, 2005
From time to time at my workplace I receive architectural drawings that have been generated by other applications different from AutoCAD, that have possibly been inserted with blocks more than once in the same insertion point and exploded. The end result is a drawing with a big number of duplicate objects causing a file bigger than it really should be.
I know many people in different parts of the world that don’t care about this issue but if you are proud of your work, and if is part of your job to implement company standards it‘s a good idea to try to control this situation.
After researching for an Autolisp routine that could resolve my problem I found an AutoCAD command that comes with the AutoCAD Express tools that does exactly what I want: The Overkill.
The overkill tool basically allows you to delete duplicates and combining line and arc segments that overlap.
The requirements are that you should have any version of the AutoCAD Express tools installed (from AutoCAD 2000 to 2006)
How to use: In the command line type “overkill” or in the pulldown menus on the top you click: express->modify->delete duplicate.
I know many people in different parts of the world that don’t care about this issue but if you are proud of your work, and if is part of your job to implement company standards it‘s a good idea to try to control this situation.
After researching for an Autolisp routine that could resolve my problem I found an AutoCAD command that comes with the AutoCAD Express tools that does exactly what I want: The Overkill.
The overkill tool basically allows you to delete duplicates and combining line and arc segments that overlap.
The requirements are that you should have any version of the AutoCAD Express tools installed (from AutoCAD 2000 to 2006)
How to use: In the command line type “overkill” or in the pulldown menus on the top you click: express->modify->delete duplicate.
Steps:
After selecting the entities or group of entities that you want, press enter. A dialogue box will pop up where you have some options that will let you:
- Control how overkill compares objects
- Control the precision with which overkill makes numeric comparisons
- Setting up how AutoCAD deals with lines and polylines
- Controlling how AutoCAD handles objects that partially overlap and obscure one another.
If you want to know more about the overkill command, or need help during this task, click on the Help button highlighted below. Given that this time Autodesk has included good documentation to back up one of their tools, it would be good for us, the users, to appreciate such a gesture.
I hope users of AutoCAD involved in drafting find this posting useful. Let me know in the comments what you think. I will be writing more soon.
4 Comments:
HI, I work in the Civil Engineering field and i am always getting architect drawing filled with duplicates. i've never even heard of this command but i'll use it now. Thanks
commented by 
Doug Slepicka, 6/14/2005 3:15 PM
Doug Slepicka, 6/14/2005 3:15 PM
Very useful, I work in an architectural office with different cad-programms. the whole office is cheering.thanks
We've been using this command for sometime;s it is a VERY powerful command. One thing to note, being very careful of the setting before you OVERKILL, and (depending type of computer setup) do a save.
We also have found that using OVERKILL in conjunction with FLATTEN, is a major time saver.
We also have found that using OVERKILL in conjunction with FLATTEN, is a major time saver.
This command still does not optimise a Pline. I work in an architectural office and often have to prepare very large contour sets for DTM modelling. the sites range from 200-2000 acres and the civil eng GIS data we receieve often has many many thousands of redundant vertices in areas of the polyline that are virtually a straight. Lisps that "weed" vertices are not usefull because they just remove every other vertex from the pline irrespective of the lines geometry. What is needed is a command that removes complexty in areas of the pline with min. degree of curvature while preserving verticies where the line is highly curverd.
