AutoCAD Civil 3D :: Create Surface From OG - Show Only Two Elevation Contours
Oct 1, 2013
I created a new surface, pasted my OG surface into it, set the build to exclude elevations less than and greater than but my surface still is showing every contour range. I want to only show contours at elevations of 371.5 and 370.5
I am working on a large park project. I have a proposed and existing surface. I have created a volume surface to show elevation banding with cut and fill ranges. I need to create a drawing for someone who doesn't have civil 3d showing all the "cut" areas. They really want a boundary of hatch. What is the best way to do this after I change my analysis to -30 feet cut to 0 feet cut.
So I received a whole bunch of contours from an architect. They are lines and arc. big sweeping arcs. Whats the best and fastest way to create a good surface. I can change them globally to a polyline but I need to add vertices like every 5 or 10 feet to get a good surface. Can I select multiple feature lines (after converted) to add vertices?
Some background: We have a composite surface of existing surveyed contours as a TIN pasted into existing aerial contours that we received from a client. We used polylines to generate our proposed contours, and then generated a proposed surface from that. We've made a blank surface, pasted in the existing surface, and are trying to paste in our proposed surface... only the existing contours outside of the proposed suface no longer line up correctly once we do.
We've tried applying the method laid out here: [URL] ........ (and the link referenced in the bottom) but are still having trouble getting the surface to work. We've tried offsetting as little as 0.25' and as much as 5' with the feature line draped over the existing surface, but it seemed that the greater the offset, the greater the discrepancy.
Just to make sure we even tried that correctly - should the breaklines that we add be standard or non-destructive? (I've tried it both ways with little success either way, so I don't know if it matters much in this instance, but perhaps for future reference it would work.)
I've attached a screen shot of our surfaces. The pink and green lines are the proposed contours, the white dashed are the existing. The outer red line is offset 0.25'. As I've mentioned, we've tried offsetting various amounts with decreasing success.
I have a surface with a bunch of contours. I want to view the contours at elevation 550. In Microstation there is a set display depth command. Is there a tool in autocad where I can view certain elevations.
I want to make layouts/viewports that are clipped to different elevations. For example I have a surface with 5' contours. I want to create multiple viewports on a sheet showing what each contour looks like at its elevation.
Civil 3D 2012 SP4.0 Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit C3D 2014 SP1 Dell M6600, Core i7 @ 2.3GHz, 16 GB ram Dell T3500 workstation, too much ram to post
I'm using AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012 and have a question about creating a surface. Firstly, I know how to create a surface and then add contours, how to add a boundary to the surface, and how to draw a polygon around contours and trim everything out and then create a surface of what's remaining but how can I create a surface from contours within a polygon I draw without trimming any contours out? That way I can have a smaller surface to work with but still have additional contours all around it.
I have added contours to my surface (the blue lines). For some reason the surface generated contour (the orange line) is jumping across the contours I've added.
My TIN surface either did not generate contours or did not display them on my drawing. I created and tried surface styles of many contour intervals(from 0.5' and 4' to 2' and 10') without success. I made sure my contour layers on both the Style Dialog box Display Tab and Layer Properties Manager were turned on, still no success.
This is the first time I have imported a .dgn file into Civil. The drawing contains contours lines with Z elevation data. When I create a surface using this geometry (polylines + some lines) the surface seems to be scaled in the Z axis by 12.
For example pline (from dgn) is at elevation 46' but the Civil3D surface is 552'
I assume this is a setting in the Surfaces dialog box, but I cannot find it.
Also the elevation field in Properties from the dgn contours is weird. For example, in one area the (pline) contours display -28', 26', -24', -22', -20', -18' in Properties but Civil3D interprets this as a downward slope - which is the actual field conditions. I don't understand the conversion going on here.
The geometry of the pline and contours generated from the surface seem to line up in a side or isometric view (see attachment).
Often I've found myself dealing with some pretty complicated surfaces that have a lot of nooks and crannies, and many of the contour lines are only in a corner of the surface or are small and closed, and thus when I find myself wanting to have contour labels on all of the contours, there's not really one line I can draw using the "Create Multiple Labels at Interval" option to ensure that every contour is labeled. Thus I end up doing "Create Multiple At Interval" with a few different lines intersecting contours, but I often end up hitting some of the contours multiple times and I get a mess of labels.
I haven't been able to find a way to automatically just multiple labels on all of the contours at an interval in one fell swoop, so I started trying to program one...but then I got stuck with that, too.
Does any built-in method of doing what I want to do, or do I need to continue pursuing a programmatic solution?
I have a surface with 1' and 5' contours. In model space the surface behaves normally - I can select it, add labels, change the properties, etc.
But...I have several paperspace layouts and in some of them the surface is not 'selectable', it is visible but I cannot select the object (as though it didn't exist). It does not show up in the print preview or the actual plot either. (Oddly enough, the contour labels are selectable and do print out just fine...)
The paperspace layouts are pretty much identical (plan and profile sheets of a road). There are no layout overides of any sort as far as linetype, visibility, etc.
Ok we have 6 identical PC's all with the same drivers, same support paths, same plotter paths. Only one PC will not print surface contours. I can open the same file(s) on any other PC and the things print w/o issue. This one PC will not print the srf contours on only a few files. Most files there is no issue...
Quite odd that it's only one machine messing up with a few files that another machine has no issue with.
ACA 2011. I would like to copy the "standard" wall style add a surface hatch and display that in an elevation (exterior) view. I have played around with this and due to many different places to edit the materials.
I have the elevations created. When I go back into the construct and edit the wall style do I have to re-create the elevations to see the hatch? Or I think I just have something set incorrectly in the style.
I built a corridor, then corridor surface. Then I changed the corridor onto a different profile. I noticed that the contours at the end were going crazy: the new profile ended before the corridor and everything was going down to zero elevation. So I went to edit my corridor region. I enter the required station, and my contours disappear.
Observations so far:
If I set the end of the corridor region to 2+377.91 to 2+384.54 inclusive, the contours on the surface disappear. The triangles and boundary still display, and the surface gives a Z reading when I hover the mouse over it. If I set the region end to something above 2+384.54 or something below 2+377.91 the contours reappear.
My profile ends at 2+383.00, and I would like the corridor and the surface to end there too!
I am creating a surface from polylines and the surface is not being created per the what the polylines represent. These are simple 5:1, 3:1, and 3.5:1 slopes. The surface wants to create curves instead of straigtlines (see attached).
I've created a surface using Civil 3D 2013. I made a boundary around the perimeter of the site and I've also made some boundaries inside the site where there are no survey points. I assigned "Hide" to these boundaries when I made them in order to not have contours projecting into these areas.
However, with the exception of one of the inner boundaries, some contours are showing up inside the boundaries as well as partial contours. Why are the contours visible and how do I stop them from showing up?
I have an existing surface and I need to creat a surface using contour lines of a at the high point on a spillway to the bottom of my pond to calculate volumes. How do I do this?
AutoCAD/Survey Tech Merritt LS L.L.C.. 743 Horizon Ct. Suite 100B Grand Junction, CO 81506
The engineers at my company digitize proposed contours in a drawing and then they want me to create a surface out of the contours....the contours usually are 2 foot contours with areas that the software tends to translate based on the contours that I selected to create the surface.....I then usually need to create a profile, which does not look accurate compared to the contours, such as low spots etc...............
My question is since the engineers at my work do not how to use the software, and I am not an engineer, making the profile look a certain way sometimes needs to be tweeked by me.... How to alter the proposed surface?I am pretty sure that feature lines cannot cross contours that I have selected to create the surface?
I am trying to create an elevation label that will give me the spot elevation followed by the letters "TC" and then on the line below subtract 4 inches from the elevation followed by the letters "BC". It's easy enogh to add the letters but the simple equation of elevation - 4 inches eludes me.
I want to extract contours with elevation labels from a C3D 2011 surface for use in another 2011 drawing without the surface, as polylines and labels. Is there a way to do this?
I have a surface that shows perfectly when restoring the PCSM layer state (Old LMAN function). When I restore the Grading layer state - the surface contours show incorrectly.
It is like a hide or mask feature turns on and off.
Any way to evenly space contours around a curve in a surface.
Many times I have a steep area in a surface that needs to be displayed using 1 foot contour intervals, and in certain areas the contours are crossing each other around curved areas, like a curve in a ditch. In the past i have had to "fudge" the surface a little to get the contours to look correct.
I need to output the contours my surface model to a genio for use in Mx. I have the Genio exporter tool installed but when i output the genio all that appears is the Boundary line without the contours, which when i think about it makes sense as the surface contours is more a display option rather than actual contours. Is there a way of exporting the contours via genio.
I have tried multiple types of hide boundaries,etc. for this, and cant find a solution. I'm sure it is very simple, but..
I need a corridor that transitions from 2% sideslope to 0% sideslope. This transition occurs in a horizontal AND vertical curve. I understand I could use EOP alignments, profiles, etc to achieve this. I dont have the time or civil3D knowledge to figure this out on a friday afternoon...
So... my plan is to not apply the transition, and just hide the contours in the transition area and sketch them in by hand. I want to corridor surface to remain so that when other profiles are created from this surface it is still somewhat accurate (instead of removing this portion of corridor surface, and adding simple contours to the surface). I just want the surface hidden for +/- 50'.
Everything I have tried hides the surface everywhere, including new profiles from the surface.
I have a existing ground surface drefed into a model and am trying to get a user defined contour at a set elevation but nothing appears. I have userdefined layer on in the surface style and other ideas why it will not appear?
I often have to do storm pond surfaces that (for the purposes of planning) are flat on the bottom. These surfaces are created from a combination of survey data and grading groups and the tin of these surfaces is perfectably acceptable. However, when contours are shown, the flat bottom is shown with contours jig-jagging all over the place.
The attached image shows a comparison of the same pond. The top was created with survey data and grading groups; the bottom was created using contour data only. The generated surface on the top shows the bottom contour going in different directions and has parts where the an expected contour is missing.
How to correct/manipulate the surface to show a proper flat surface?
I used the Volume dashboard to cal volume so when I view the surface in object viewer or 3D I see my TIN volumes surface at zero elevation is this right? I think the reason is because they want us to see both surface so they are not on top of one to another.