Being Civil

Implications of Rotating a Surface

There may be times where you need to rotate some Points you got form your survey crew.  However, these Points have already been used to create a Surface.  What is the best way to go about this?

Well, first thing to know is that you only want to rotate the Points, not the Surface.  If you grab both, it will end up doubling up the rotation of the Surface.  So make sure you are only rotating the definition of the Surface and then simply rebuild your Surface to see the corrected location.  But wait…there’s more!

Surfaces – Multiple Viewports, Multiple Styles

Here in Product Support, we all have certain features of the application that we naturally gravitate towards.  For me, I love working on Surface related issues.  After having to manually triangulate a Surface during that winter Land Surveying class I took my freshman year of college, you’d think I would be scared for life!

Anyways, we all know that Civil 3D has some incredible Surface functionality.  Being able to change the Style on the fly to display elevation ranges and slopes is such a great tool.  But what happens when you want to show all of that information at the same time.  For example, your planset needs to show the Contours, the Slope Analysis, as well as the Elevation Analysis.  And, they want to show them all on the same sheet.  The Surface can only have a single Style assigned to it, so what is the best way to do this?

Surface from Ellipses and Splines?

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.

Print Surface Properties

I’m back from my vacation and wanted to show my presence by sharing a tip with you. If you ever wanted to export Surface information and surface statistics you quickly realized that there is no export option. Fortunately, if you expand one of the nodes such as General, Extended or TIN you will get “Copy to Clipboard” option.

 

Then…all you need to do is to chose media where to paste it. That can be in the drawing, in Notepad, MS Word, …even MS Excel

     

  

Enjoy!

Edit Default Surface Commands

It’s one of those days when you feel that you are working hard but not feeling very productive....Almost feel like running on a treadmill... So in order to put little balance and boost my moral I'm taking a break to share something most of you already know, but I noticed only when customer asked if it’s possible to do in 2009 version (Thanks, Pius, for forcing me to look).

Back in the old Civil 3D days and especially when moving those old Land Desktop surfaces to Civil 3D (I know… we should use LandXML when importing LDT objects) or polylines that once represented contours we were able to add those polylines to the surface definitions in quick and easy way.  If you remember it was also possible (just like it’s possible now) to set Weeding and Supplementing factors right before contours are added to the surface definitions. Unfortunately, back in the days it was not possible to control these values unless you wanted to set it manually for each selection.

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.

 

Error importing TIN from Land Desktop

Creating surface from TIN is very easy process unless there is a problem with .tin file or when .pnt file is missing. I’m sure some of you out there have seen this message when trying to create new surface by importing TIN file.

This is typically the case when a surface is created in Land Desktop and the same data is used in Civil 3D. In order to import TIN file and create surface from it, this file must be accompanied by .pnt file and exist in the same directory. So, try to locate the .pnt file with the same name as .tin file and place it in the same directory as .tin file or ask your contractor to provide you one.

As an alternative, the entire project can be imported from Land Desktop via Insert tab > Land Desktop or (IMPORTLDTDATA).

Vault: Upgrading COGO Points

Weekend is coming up, Support is climbing up corporate ladder (moving from second to third floor), it's raining in Manchester (again), everybody is packing stuff (and I should be too), Justin is fighting with phone connection, Jason is on the road.. pretty idyllic. I thought now is just perfect time to throw another tip before saying good bye to my cubicle.

Have you ever encountered a problem when adding drawing to a project in Vault just hangs (and never crashes) while “Upgrading COGO points”? During add-in program copied all files correctly to Working Folder but file was still missing from File Store and not visible in Prospector or Vault Explorer. So there is something clearly that prevented copying of this file to the Vault. Hanging in “Update COGO points” indicated that it has something to do with surface and/or points.

Now, investigating surface (3D ORBIT or Object Viewer are great tool for troubleshooting, by the way) I have discovered that surface had some points with zero elevation and program triangulated it so it became visible in 3D orbit. It looked something like this image shows.

As you can guess, after this point, all I had to do was to remove this offending point, remove triangle lines (In Prospector tab>Surface>’Surfacename’>Definition> right-click on Edits and choose delete line) and rebuild the surface. After this point we were able to add drawing, check it out and do other things with it.

Have a nice weekend, all!