Being Civil

What are these…. phantom points called “Split Points”?

One thing that I like the most on my job (beside helping customers) is that there is almost no day that I come home without feeling energized with something new I learned that day. That also serves as a reminder how much more there is to be learned! In any case, while trying to figure out the best way to help one of our frequent and savvy Civil 3D customer, I came across a workaround that may be helpful for all of us. The issue described to me is that customer created some Feature Lines that crossed other Feature Lines which at the crossing points program created Split (Elevation) Points. At one point those points were very useful in designing process (User trimmed feature lines up to that point so that he can use these split points as starting points when creating new feature lines) but they became a problem when user needed to remove them.

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.

 

Undocumented Commands Can Make Your Drawing More Stable

Before the phones started ringing this morning, I was catching up on some early reading.and ran across this article by Donnie Gladfelter. Donnie is a great friend of mine, and I am one of the people that he worked with a few weeks ago on his perfect storm issue. I had to call him this morning to talk about this article, as one of his links was a tiny bit outdated and not very easily found during a normal search of our knowledgebase. We discussed it, and I told him that I would write this as a supplement to his already excellent article to explain a bit more in-depth what was happening.

Drawing Cleanup - a tool you should all know about!

So we know in Product Support that there are some of you out there who regularly use the functions of Map 3D included within Civil 3D.  But there are many of you out there who hardly if ever touch the Map functions and don't really need to most of the time.  Well here's a tool that has been around a long time.  If you haven't used it, read on, as I'm sure it will come in handy at some point for you.

Go to the menu Map > Tools and select Drawing Cleanup (or you can type in _mapclean).  The first panel is where you choose which objects to work with.  On the second panel you choose the cleanup options you would like, I have highlighted some that I have found particularly useful:

 

Delete Duplicates - always good for cleaning drawings you get from other sub-contractors (I'm sure no one in your office ever creates duplicates, right?)

Break Crossing Objects - I love this one for testing pesky plines that won't join.  Or if you are having problems with feature lines, explode them back to a pline and run this little gem.  It will find any cases where the pline may have crossed back on itself, for example, and then you can use a small erase window to easily select the offending parts and delete them, rejoin or remake into a feature line, and just maybe, problem solved.

Zero Length Objects - well like it says, can clean out some little objects that are hard to find.

Weed Polylines - we have other ways to accomplish this, but this one works too, an oldy but a goody.

Spend just 10 minutes today reviewing the Help on this tool, get familiar with it and I'm sure it will come in handy before you know it.  Feel free to leave your own story on Mapcleanup, I'm sure I'm not the only one using it!

What Site does a Feature Line belong to?

So today I was working on a Technical Solution regarding cleaning feature lines.  While working, you might need to pick some feature lines and figure out what site they belong to.

As with most Civil 3D objects, I would expect to select the feature line, right-click and pick Feature Line Properties and then see a site name for which site it belongs to.  No luck.  I looked in plain AutoCAD Properties, hopeful - nope.  How about selecting the feature line in Prospector and then looking in the Item View list at the bottom?  Still no luck.  Now I got creative - how about selecting the feature line, right-click and choosing the Move to Site command, maybe that would show where it currently sits - man, foiled again!  So I did some searching, there are two places you can find it:

In the Feature Line Properties title bar:
(why the heck didn't I notice that when I had the box open earlier?!)

 

Or you can simply use the List command: