Hello all,

We are a distributor of industrial sheet metal folding equipment. The control on out machines uses a DXF file of a specific format to define the part geometry, material, part thickness, and other parameters needed for programming the part automatically. Inventor can easily be configured to export a sheet metal part to the required DXF format, but I have not been able to find a way to do the same in SolidWorks.

This is the DXF format I need to create:

[DXF Layers]

OUTER_CONTOUR - Contains the outer cutout of the part
INNER_CONTOUR - Contains any internal cutouts in the part

BEND_LINES - Contains the bend center lines

[Extended Data per bendline]

BEND_ANGLE - The angle of the bend (-90, +90, or anywhere in-between)

BEND_RADIUS - The radius of the bend

MATERIAL_ID - The name of the material

MATERIAL_THICKNESS - The material thickness

I can get the layers correct by using the dwg/dxf export map file, but I can not figure out how I can add the xData with the bend parameters to the DXF. I assume this would probably require a macro, but I have no idea where to begin. Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.