Extracting Contour from Surface (Feature Line from Contour)

I was minding my own business today trying to troubleshoot this issue with a break in a contour line…but that is the issue for some future post if I ever figure it out (tips from you guys are very welcome). Then in the middle of my desperation IM from my colleague Seth came asking if we know how to turn contour into Feature Line. Off course, we immediately thought “Explode”. But there is more elegant way to do it which briefly crossed my mind (backflash from playing with with exporting points from surface). How about if we use Extract Objects command? To illustrate I selected my surface and from Contextual tab that appeared on top my Extract Objects command appeared.

 

So here are the steps:

1. Select surface
2. From contextual ribbon click on Extract Objects
3. In the Extract Objects from Surface leave only Minor or Major contour checked (depending what kind of contour line you want to extract).

    

4. Then you change Select All to Select from Drawing and you’ll get an option to hand pick your Major or Minor contour.
5. Hold CRTL button and select your contour (make sure you select Major contour if you are extracting Major and vice versa).

   When the command completes, you have a polyline on top of your contour. This polyline can be easily turned into feature line.

    

6. In Home tab, select Feature Line and go to Create Feature Lines from Object. Then select your polyline and turn it into feature line.

 

Now, we just created a feature line from surface contours. Enjoy! Now ....get back to my contour "hole" probelm.