Looking for a better way to extract 3D faces from surfaces

[Ely]

I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas on this: I am looking for a better way to get my 3D Faces from a surface into a DXF. Note: I need to have 3D Faces in a DXF as it is the only way my data collector will accept them. My current process is 1)export surface to a XML 2) open new drawing and import XML 3)make the surface style only display triangles 4)extract triangles from surface 5)change my surface style to no display 6)save drawing as a DXF. I don't like to extract the triangles from the original drawing because I am often making adjustments to the surface and then the old extracted triangles and still hanging around in the drawing. I don't want that. Looking to see if it would be possible to write a macro(or some other automated procedure) that would allow me to extract triangles as save them in a new DXF from a selected surface all in one step. Any input would help. Thanks

[jpaulsen]

Extract the triangles, copy them to the clipboard. paste into new drawing, saveas DXF.

You can skip the XML part. Just don't save the drawing after extracting the triangles.

[Jeff_M]

Same idea as jpaulsen, but fewer steps:
Extract the Triangles, select one of them, select similar, Wblock with the option to delete the objects selected. When specifying the file name you can choose to save as a DXF.

[jpaulsen]

I've been using wblock for 20 years and never realized you could change file format. Nice tip.

[Ely]

Same idea as jpaulsen, but fewer steps:
Extract the Triangles, select one of them, select similar, Wblock with the option to delete the objects selected. When specifying the file name you can choose to save as a DXF.

Thanks for that tip. That gets me a lot closer to the workflow I want to have. I have actually done the exact same thing before except I forgot you could select "delete from drawing". I really don't like the option of just not saving my drawing just in case I forget to save directly before extracting triangles. That plus I would rather not go out of the drawing just to open it back up again to continue working. Big help. Thanks