Tutorials BimCraft help Walkthroughs
Find linked drawings and pictures
Show a drawing's linked drawings (xrefs) and title-block pictures, by opening its folder or adding the files by hand.
Written for BimCraft 0.3. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
What you'll do
Make a drawing complete: show the drawings it links to (external references, or xrefs) and the pictures it uses, such as a logo in the title block.
The easy way: open the folder
- Click Open a folder and choose the folder that holds the drawing and its links, for example the whole
Cadfolder of a project. - In the folder report, scroll to CAD drawings.
- Click the drawing.
- Look at the Properties panel on the right, under Linked drawings and Images.
BimCraft looks for each linked drawing by its name ("name.dwg"), in the same folder as the drawing first, then anywhere in the folder you opened. Pictures are found the same way, and also by a similar name: an eTransmit or Revit export often adds the project's name in front, so logo.png is found as Tower-logo-5425051.png.
The other way: add files by hand
- Open the drawing on its own.
- On the right, under Linked drawings, click Add linked drawings…. Under Images, the button is Add pictures…; both open the same chooser.
- Choose the linked
.dwgfiles and the picture files. You can choose several at once. - Wait while BimCraft opens the drawing again with them.
What you should see
Each linked drawing and picture is listed with a label:
| Label | Means |
|---|---|
| Shown | Found and drawn. The path under it says where it came from, or "added by you". |
| Shown, similar name | A picture found by a similar name. Check it is the right one. |
| Not found | Not in the folder or the files you added. A missing picture shows as its empty frame. |
| TIFF cannot be shown in a browser | The picture is a TIFF file, which browsers do not draw. Save it as PNG with the same name and add it. |
| Could not be read | The file was found but could not be opened as a picture. |
The Drawing panel on the left shows "n of m loaded" for linked drawings. Linked drawings' layers appear in Layers as "link name|layer".
Common mistakes
- Opening only the drawing. "This drawing shows its own content only until its linked drawings are added. Opening the whole project folder finds them automatically."
- Opening a folder too small. If the links live in a sibling folder, open the parent folder instead.
- Renamed links. BimCraft matches linked drawings by name. A link renamed on disk is not found; add it by hand.
- Links of links. BimCraft loads the drawings the open drawing links to. Drawings linked inside those are not looked for, so they usually do not show in this build.