How to Use the OPTIMIZE, OVERKILL and SIMPLIFY Commands in BricsCAD

Quick answer: Exporting geometry from 3D software and importing it into a 2D drawing can leave lines angled, overlapping, or with small gaps between them. A three-command workflow cleans this up: OPTIMIZE straightens lines, OVERKILL removes duplicates and joins contiguous entities, and SIMPLIFY trims away unnecessary vertices afterward. The specific tolerance values below come from one worked example; your own drawing will likely need different ones.

When You’d Use This Workflow

This comes up specifically after exporting from 3D software and importing into a 2D drawing, incompatibilities between programs can leave what should be clean, straight geometry, like the walls of a room plan, slightly angled, broken into pieces, overlapping itself, or with small gaps between segments.

Step 1: Straightening Lines with OPTIMIZE

OPTIMIZE straightens angled lines, and depending on how messy the import was, you may need to run it more than once, progressively tightening the tolerances each time.

In one worked example, the first run used:

• Selection: all the lines in question
• Close gaps: unchecked
• Reference angles: horizontal and vertical
• Angle tolerance: 6 degrees
• Distance tolerance: 50 mm

A second run, to refine further, tightened the angle tolerance and turned on gap closing:

• Selection: all the lines in question
• Close gaps: checked
• Reference angles: horizontal and vertical
• Angle tolerance: 1 degree
• Distance tolerance: 50 mm

Step 2: Removing Duplicates and Joining Entities with OVERKILL

OVERKILL handles three things in one pass: deleting duplicated and overlapping entities, straightening angled entities, and joining partly overlapping or contiguous entities into single, continuous ones. In the same worked example, a 1 mm tolerance was enough to accomplish all three at once.

Step 3: Reducing Vertices with SIMPLIFY

Joining several lines into one polyline via OVERKILL can leave that polyline with far more vertices than it actually needs. SIMPLIFY removes the unnecessary ones.

1. Start the command.
2. Choose the Simplify method.
3. Choose the Max angle and distance option.

In the worked example, the parameters used were:

• Maximum distance between non-collinear vertices to straighten: 1
• Maximum change in angle between two consecutive segments to straighten: 1
• Straighten polyline arc segments: No

A Note on These Parameter Values

Every tolerance value above is specific to the one example it came from. How well this workflow performs depends heavily on your drawing’s complexity and how severe its irregularities are, so expect to experiment with different values at each step rather than reusing these exact numbers directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I always need to run OPTIMIZE more than once? Not necessarily, it depends on how messy the imported geometry is. Complex or heavily distorted drawings may need a first pass with looser tolerances, followed by a second pass with tighter ones.

What does OVERKILL actually do, beyond just deleting duplicates? It deletes duplicated and overlapping entities, straightens angled ones, and joins partly overlapping or contiguous entities together, all in a single command.

Why would I need SIMPLIFY after already running OVERKILL? Because joining several lines into one polyline with OVERKILL can leave that polyline with more vertices than necessary. SIMPLIFY trims those excess vertices back down.

Can I just reuse the tolerance values from this example on my own drawing? Not reliably. They were tuned for one specific case; your drawing’s complexity and the severity of its irregularities will likely call for different values.