Today I got a customer’s question asking if it is possible to add contours to the surface. In fact, he received whole bunch of polylines, ellipses and splines to represent contours. When he started adding them (not surprisingly) all ellipses and splines were ignored. So is it even possible to add them to the surface definition?The answer is, off course, yes and no. No because Civil 3D will not be able to add them by default, yes because if we manage to make them behave as polylines that would be possible.
So in order to do that, we need to do some manual work and to adjust some system variable settings. Another thing is that if spline is created from polyline that will be easy to add to the surface definition just like any other polyline (In Prospector tab, expand Surface and definition and right click on Contours to add them). I would recommend doing following workaround before you attempt to add contours to the surface definitions and add these objects at once.
To turn spline into the polyline we can use PEDIT command and choose to Decurve it or right-click on Spline, choose Edit Spline and use “convert to Polyline” option (type letter "P in command line).
With ellipse it is little harder since you would need to recreate these ellipses again. First set PELLIPSE system variable to 1 (creates a polyline representation of an ellipse) and then draw ELLIPSE using snap to Quadrant. Select the bottom quadrant and then top and then left or right to make exact replica of the ellipse you have.
Now all your objects will act like polylines and you’ll be able to add to them as contours.
I hope this helps somebody else, too. I’d be glad to learn if there is better way to do this. Anyone wants to share it?
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