There are many ways to make a flat contour from a 3D solid: section planes, FlatShot and SolProf commands. But they are all very limited and have so many drawbacks. The A>V>C> Flat (FLT) command can roll out any drawings to the plane, all drawing objects.

FLT has the following advantages and features:

• • Works without preliminary preparation, does not ask for anything superfluous, and projects everything on the XY plane directly under the place where the original object was.

  • Do not clap windows; do not open dialogues.

  • It works with a lot more objects besides 3D solids: Mesh, PolygonMesh, PolyFaceMesh, Surface, Region, Body, and Face will turn into lines.

  • The programme will design any curves on XY, both three-dimensional and flat (not aligned on XY).

  • Converts exotic Polyline2d and Polyline3d to regular polylines.

  • If you accidentally scattered the texts in different planes, the program will help to transfer all annotations to the XY plane without distortion.

  • The program gets inside of blocks, arrays, and external references and flattens all suitable objects inside them.

  • At the end, nothing should explode anymore; no blocks are created.

  • Can work in the current user coordinate system (UCS), and so you can easily redirect the projection to the current view or on the face of a solid.

  • The results are redistributed on layers MD_Visible and MD_Hidden, but this can be turned off.

  • Can immediately call the Outside Loop (OSL) programme for the visible contours of each object.

  • The line weight is assigned by Layer, and not zero, as FlatShot mistakenly does.

  • The program resets to zero the pseudo-three-dimensional property "Thickness" for all lines, polylines, and 2D solids.

  • The name and description of the solidus are transferred to all its contours.

  • In the process of long-term work, a progress bar is shown.

  • The original object can be deleted if you want it.

  • You can set up to nine offset styles with different settings and then quickly switch styles directly from the command line. Or from a macro on a homemade button.

It is convenient to use this command to get layouts of rooms according to the drawings obtained by exporting from 3ds Max (from all kinds of meshes and strange 2D polylines).

The program can be used to prepare contours for drawing in solid—Z-twisted splines and polylines become flat and suitable for Extrude.

The program is not designed to make flat drawings from 3D assemblies of many solids. It works with each solid separately, and all parts hidden behind will be drawn with visible lines. For assemblies, use viewports or the _ViewBase command, not FLT.

Regardless of the Autodesk® AutoCAD® localisation language, you can switch the plugin to English, Italian, German, Russian, Chinese (PRC), Spanish, French, or Turkish localisation.