Why do I have unexpected geometry artifacts resulting from geoprocessing operations on CAD data?

Answer

Geoprocessing operations on CAD data, or on feature classes imported from CAD, may result in unexpected geometry artifacts in the output data. These artifacts may appear in the output as circles or other geometries where no such elements appear in the input data.

CAD data converted to geodatabase format, or used directly in geoprocessing operations, may include zero-length features or other invalid geometries not supported in GIS operations. These invalid geometries may only appear after a geoprocessing operation.

The data used in ArcGIS tools and operations need to be free of geometry errors. Geometry errors include:

• short segments
• null geometry
• incorrect ring ordering
• incorrect segment orientation
• self intersections
• unclosed rings
• empty parts
• duplicate vertices
• mismatched attributes
• discontinuous parts
• empty Z values
• bad envelopes
• bad dataset extents

Refer to the associated documentation links for descriptions of these errors and how to fix them.