I have been meaning to write about this for a while now but for some reason the timing was pretty bad for me every time the thought crossed my mind....until, my colleague Phil (our Map 3D guru) asked for it. He’s got an issue where a user had a drawing with hundreds of points represented by blocks. These were not COGO civil points and they had no Z values (all were 0.00). His goal was to find the elevation for each point. Luckily he had a valid Existing surface. So basically he wanted to project his “points” to the surface. Here is how that can be done.
First let’s confirm that our blocks don’t have correct elevations by going into object’s properties
2. Select our Existing Surface and from Contextual ribbon expand Surface Tools and pick “Move Block to Surface”
3. The next dialog should pop-up showing available blocks. Let’s select our Tree and Utility Pole blocks
4. Finally, let’s check the object properties and confirm that our block now have some elevation values gotten from our surface
Note: This is also useful if you want to use visualization tools and use multi-view blocks during rendering. Also, you can then create Civil Points from it if necessary. Procedure is explained in this link: Convert Point Block References to Civil Points
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