DWG inches

Bozidar Culav said:

How can I fix a dwg using MicroStation so that its dimensions do not change when changing units?

You should mention the version of MicroStation that you are using.

MicroStation Help has some information about DWG import.

download and install free autocad true view ... then you can open dwg and you can find out what the units used are  ie truen units or unitless.. keyin units and  it should tell you.

other advantage is you can use it to save to any  version you want .. especially if your version of mstn doesnt handle the active version of DWG used, then True view cna convert it to earlier versions.. and also batch convert in place so files are not renamed just changes versions, also it lets you see what the DWG looks like in a DWG environment.. very useful free tool... I've never tried to use it to change units but if I know what the units actually are it helps when xrefing into  mstn so I can scale it to suit or import into mnst at right scale and location relative to real world survey..

I do the following: I reference the dwg with any available method. then I use the Scale Reference tool using the 3 point method.

not much  point scaling  if you don't  have real points to scale against...

I am a metric world drafter in meters so for me  its either 1: 1 or 1:1000  when attaching acad ..fortunately I have something to compare with ie an airphoto , or some other survey  or I roughly  know where its supposed to be so I can turn on Bing even in v8i as I have a bing key  and  can check if its 1000's of meters away  or drawn as if it were  mm  so I have to scale it 1000 x  and very rare occasions 100 x  ie centimeters...

a lot of acad drafters here in Oz  have the annoying habit  of taking everything drawn 1:1 real world in meters and grouping it all and scaling down 1000xs to make it mm and  move it all down to 0,0  totally destroying any reference to real world coordinates... sometimes you can get lucky and scale it up 1000's and it goes back to realworld coordinates...  but not always... 

AutoCAD users do get pretty cavalier with their units...I ran into the "we used whatever" problem on a drawing the other day.

1 inch is .0254 meter, and so 1 meter is 39.37007874 inches. You *should* be able to use whichever scale factor suits your situation to scale your drawing around xy=0,0,0 to get it into the correct position.

You can also turn OFF the "True Scale" setting when attaching the drawing. In theory, that should prevent MicroStation from calculating between units (although sometimes it doesn't always work, so something else may be happening).