AVC Zone

About the plugin

Create a closed loop around a curve at a specified distance. Merge several such contours.

If you work with flat plans of water pipes, gas pipelines and similar networks, then you probably have to solve the problem of constructing zone boundaries around this pipe. Typically, a pipeline is indicated by lines and curves. And there may be many more branches. It’s not difficult to make a couple of offsets in a line in both directions and add lines at the ends to close the contour of the zone. But what if there are dozens of lines, hundreds of branches, and you still need to remove the intersections of zone contours from different pipelines and combine them all into a single region, one closed polyline. Such work on a gasification plan for a small village can take half a day. But the simple and convenient AVC Zone command comes to your aid. You will only need to select the lines and the zone width (offset distance). Then the program will do everything itself almost instantly.
Another application of this program will be useful for CNC milling technologists. You will be able to construct a sampling contour along the trajectory of the circular cutter. For example, draw a polyline with a snake and call Zone with a distance of 5mm. You will receive a contour with a width equal to the size of a cutter with a diameter of 10 mm, repeating the shape of the original polyline with roundings at the ends. Now you can extrude this outline from the 3D solid.

Additional program features

• Work with any 2D curves: lines, polylines, 2D polylines, splines, arcs, circles, ellipses.
• Working with 3D Curves: 3D polylines and 3D splines will be XY projected before drawing the zone outline. All other curves are also projected onto the XY plane.
• Working in the user coordinate system UCS. The result will lie in the XY plane of the current coordinate system, not the world coordinate system. This can be useful for engraving on flat surfaces of solids.
• On unclosed curves, the program can make two options for completion - connecting offsets in a straight line or in an arc.
• You can set up filtering of the original lines and not worry that the selection includes axes, dimensions and other auxiliary lines that do not need to be enclosed in a zone.
• You can create a zone as a region, instead of polylines and splines.
• You can automatically delete original curves.
• You can assign any layer to a zone or create a zone outline on the default layer. Moreover, if the layer you specified is not in the drawing, it will be loaded from the template or a new one will be created.
• You can disable the distance request and use the same distance many times.
• You can configure up to 9 zone styles and quickly switch all settings at once.
• You can switch the plugin language to English, Russian, Italian, German, Chinese at any time. The plugin language is not related to the AutoCAD language. This does not require downloading any additional modules.

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To run the plugin, you will have to register account and top up your account balance or receiving bonuses.
https://sites.google.com/site/avcplugins/donate

Then you can activate one of the licenses:

• Annual license - 10 EUR.
• Unlimited license - 50 EUR. Free updates for 1 year.
• The trial period is 20 days.