Import Autodesk Plant 3D pcf help

Hi,

I am having trouble importing Autodesk Plant 3D pcfs into Autopipe. Previously, with Autopipe Select Series 3, there were issues but I was able to work around them and I could at least import the piping geometry. I upgraded to Select Series 4 expecting a vast improvement now that there is a specific Plant3D translator. However, even pcfs that I used to be able to import won't anymore, no matter what translator. See attached a screenshot of the error I recieve.

Any ideas?

Note: the large coordinates are due to our site's coordinate system, moving one point to 0,0,0 makes no difference and this error still pops up.

Thanks,
David

  • According to a technote I found (excerpt below), the behavior above is correct for pcf files with overlapping components. We display the warning to help you fix the problem now, older versions would freeze when that happened.

    Q. When trying to convert a file from PCF to NTL, the converter freezes / aborts and it never creates the NTL file, why?

    A. After reviewing the file, noticed that there are overlapping components which also freezes the PCF translator. The CAE development team will add some programming logic in the next PCF translator build to display a warning message.



  • Seth, Ive had these problems too. In your reply you mentioned "We display the warning to help you fix the problem now".
    Does now refers to the latest release, i.e. that v09.05.01.02 has a resolution by means of displaying the error?

  • Well, the technote I found covers a bunch of PCF related issues and does not indicate a specific version, so it's hard to say exactly when we changed it from freezing, to giving a nice warning with details. Dkirkma indicated SS3 gave a warning message so 9.5.1.2 (aka SELECTseries 4) should also have it. I suppose a better solution would be to convert or merge the overlapping components, but that would be a lot more difficult.



  • AutoPIPE PCF translator 1.0.0.30 and later have an option to ignore overlapping components (this is provided as a checkbox). Current version of PCF translator shipped with latest AutoPIPE v12.03.00.17 released in March 2020 is 1.0.0.82. Please reach out to Bentley Technical Support if you are interested in trying out the latest version of PCF Translator which has many new features and improvements


    This is a test

    Answer Verified By: Mike Dattilio