Converting LDD Point to Civil3D point issue

[TonyLeggieri3279]

If this has been addressed, I apologize. Simply point me in the right direction...

Short and sweet: is there a way to keep the point labels created in Land in its "dragged state" when converted to Civil3D?

We have hundreds of drawings with hundreds (thousands) of points done in LDD where the point labels (No., elev., & desctiption) have been moved to make a readable plan. Once converted to Civil3D, all of the labels reset to the C3D label default. Obviously that is a lot of time lost and in some cases will need to be recreated.

Any help will be greatly appreciated! We already know of some workarounds, but if there is an easy way to do this, we'd sure like to know!

Thanks!
Tony

[Anonymous]

Hi Tony,

There is no way of automating this.

I would make a copy of the LDD drawing and delete everything in the copy
drawing but the points, then Xref the copy into your working drawing.

If you need Civil 3D points, then you could set them up with a
non-display style so that the LDD point provides the display.

Another approach would be to use a Map query to import the relevant LDD
points into the current drawing.


Regards,


Laurie Comerford

tonyleggieri3279 wrote:
> If this has been addressed, I apologize. Simply point me in the right direction...
>
> Short and sweet: is there a way to keep the point labels created in Land in its "dragged state" when converted to Civil3D?
>
> We have hundreds of drawings with hundreds (thousands) of points done in LDD where the point labels (No., elev., & desctiption) have been moved to make a readable plan. Once converted to Civil3D, all of the labels reset to the C3D label default. Obviously that is a lot of time lost and in some cases will need to be recreated.
>
> Any help will be greatly appreciated! We already know of some workarounds, but if there is an easy way to do this, we'd sure like to know!
>
> Thanks!
> Tony
>

[TonyLeggieri3279]

Thank you, Laurie. I was 95% sure that was the answer.

We have discussed some workarounds and I think it will boil down to "it depend on the job". Some we will just not convert the points, others we will w/o worrying about the consequences, while others we may do the xref idea you reccommended.

Thank you again for the input!

Tony

[Anonymous]

{quote}

Thank you, Laurie. I was 95% sure that was the answer.

{quote}

Well, that's not the answer, and you need to keep in mind that when Laurie says
"There is no way of automating this.", what Laurie is actually saying is that
there is no way that someone with his level of software engineering skill and
experience can automate it.

I have had a customer run into this same issue, and because of the volume of
data involved (thousands of drawings, each having hundreds of points with
positioned labels), the cost of migrating that data to Civil3D, and having to
manually reposition the labels, made doing that completely out of the question.

The solution involved custom code that exports the points from LDD along with
the custom label position data (to XML), and then imports that into Civil3D.

In spite of the expense of the custom code required to do that, it was still
only a small fraction of the net sum cost of any other option, the most costly
of which was manually repositioning all of those point labels.

The astounding part of the issue is that Autodesk didn't have the sense to
address the problem, given how painfully-obvious it is, and how much of an
expense it represents to the customer in the course of migrating to Civil3D.

It serves as one example of how adept Autodesk is at being its own worst enemy.

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Email: string.Format("{0}@{1}.com", "tonyt", "caddzone");

wrote in message news:6317090@discussion.autodesk.com...
Thank you, Laurie. I was 95% sure that was the answer.

We have discussed some workarounds and I think it will boil down to "it depend
on the job". Some we will just not convert the points, others we will w/o
worrying about the consequences, while others we may do the xref idea you
reccommended.

Thank you again for the input!

Tony

[Civil3DReminders_com]

Tony, care to share how you adjusted the Civil 3D point labels to be dragged to another location then the default?

[Anonymous]

Hi Tony,

Stage one of your process is obviously quite easy, but is it a
commercial secret whether you produced Civil 3D points with variable
relative Point Number. Elevation and Description locations (something
which I have no problems admitting I don't know how to code) - or did
you create attributed blocks or text in Civil 3D? - something which
could be done with Map queries.

If it was Civil 3D points what language did you use?


Regards,


Laurie Comerford

Tony Tanzillo wrote:
> {quote}
>
> Thank you, Laurie. I was 95% sure that was the answer.
>
> {quote}
>
> Well, that's not the answer, and you need to keep in mind that when Laurie says
> "There is no way of automating this.", what Laurie is actually saying is that
> there is no way that someone with his level of software engineering skill and
> experience can automate it.
>
> I have had a customer run into this same issue, and because of the volume of
> data involved (thousands of drawings, each having hundreds of points with
> positioned labels), the cost of migrating that data to Civil3D, and having to
> manually reposition the labels, made doing that completely out of the question.
>
> The solution involved custom code that exports the points from LDD along with
> the custom label position data (to XML), and then imports that into Civil3D..
>
> In spite of the expense of the custom code required to do that, it was still
> only a small fraction of the net sum cost of any other option, the most costly
> of which was manually repositioning all of those point labels.
>
> The astounding part of the issue is that Autodesk didn't have the sense to
> address the problem, given how painfully-obvious it is, and how much of an
> expense it represents to the customer in the course of migrating to Civil3D..
>
> It serves as one example of how adept Autodesk is at being its own worst enemy.
>
>

[Anonymous]

I'll have to apologize for not being terribly forthcoming
with this, but because Autodesk appears to have the
intentions of 'locking up' your data, such as point label
characteristics so you can't access them programmatically,
I simply refuse to discuss how we went about doing that,
largely out of fear that if I did, Autodesk might choose to
implement countermeasures in the next product release
that might break our solution.

So the only thing I can tell you is that it involved native C++
ObjectARX code, and a largely undocumented means of
accessing the data that Civil3D stores in the drawing, which
is not available through any published API.

To be completely honest, both myself and the customer
are completely disgusted with Autodesk's totally lame
performance WRT scripting and customizing Civil3D.

This is but one of dozens of examples of how customers
suffer great harm as a result of a grossly-deficient API, that
has been that way for way too long.

--
http://www.caddzone.com

AcadXTabs: MDI Document Tabs for AutoCAD
Supporting AutoCAD 2000 through 2010

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Email: string.Format("{0}@{1}.com", "tonyt", "caddzone");

wrote in message news:6322034@discussion.autodesk.com...
Tony, care to share how you adjusted the Civil 3D point labels to be dragged to
another location then the default?

[Civil3DReminders_com]

Tony's response reminded me of the Custom Draw API that comes with Civil 3D. The land desktop point label could be made into an Anonymous Block and then used to override how Civil 3D shows the point. That way you could keep the point look the same, but have access to the point in Civil 3D. Probably not as nice of a solution as Tony came up with. I know Civil 3D comes with some samples for the Custom Draw API, I haven't messed around with it though.

Christopher

[Anonymous]

Hi Tony,

I spoke too soon - I probably should have said there may be no
acceptable method of doing this.

Tony T. won't tell me what the output of his program is (for example if
they are Civil 3D points, how had he handled their drag mode? do they
return to his values if dragged and returned? etc., but his comments set
me thinking again.

If you were prepared to have a large number of points styles in your
drawing then it is quite possible to import the LDD points with the same
text positions as in the LDD drawing.

Essentially the process would be to read the data from the LDD to get
the insertion points of the attributes relative to the block insertion
point.

You could then define (with VBA code or .NET code as suits) a Point
label style with the appropriate label offsets to match the attribute
offsets measured in LDD and use that style on the new point you create.

As this would lead to a point label style for every point (except for
the unedited ones which obviously you would handle as a special case) -
it requires some common sense adjustment such as accepting that all
values within a suitable range reduce to a fixed value.

The critical VBA code for this process is:
{code}
Dim oObj As Object

Set oObj = ogCivilDocument.PointLabelStyles.Item("NewLabelStyle")
oObj.TextComponents.Item(0).XOffset = Your computed X offset value for
the point number
oObj.TextComponents.Item(0).YOffset = Your computed Y offset value for
the point number
oObj.TextComponents.Item(1).XOffset = Your computed X offset value for
the elevation
oObj.TextComponents.Item(1).YOffset = Your computed Y offset value for
the elevation
oObj.TextComponents.Item(2).XOffset = Your computed X offset value for
the description
oObj.TextComponents.Item(2).YOffset = Your computed Y offset value for
the description
oObj.BlockComponents.Add Name of block inserted by LDD via
Description keys process

{code}

One other curious thing I noticed was that if I used an offset value of
two, the software errored telling me that my value of 20,000 exceeded
the allowable value of 10,000!!!!

I haven't checked why this happened, but values like .01 gave reasonable
results while I was testing

Lastly, to do this you don't need to speak C++, abuse Autodesk, search
for undocumented things and keep them secret in case Autodesk in their
paranoia find out and destroy them, etc.


Regards,


Laurie Comerford

tonyleggieri3279 wrote:
> Thank you, Laurie. I was 95% sure that was the answer.
>
> We have discussed some workarounds and I think it will boil down to "it depend on the job". Some we will just not convert the points, others we will w/o worrying about the consequences, while others we may do the xref idea you reccommended.
>
> Thank you again for the input!
>
> Tony
>

[Anonymous]

I've come up with another way of solving the problem
of moving point labels that doesn't rely on the code that
I had written previously for my customer (which they hold
all rights to, and which I cannot distribute).

This also cannot be easily broken by Autodesk without
also breaking Civil3D and its enabler, so I can share it
for everyone's benefit:

http://www.caddzone.com/AeccDbCogoPointHelper.zip

--
http://www.caddzone.com

AcadXTabs: MDI Document Tabs for AutoCAD
Supporting AutoCAD 2000 through 2010

http://www.acadxtabs.com

Email: string.Format("{0}@{1}.com", "tonyt", "caddzone");

wrote in message news:6323320@discussion.autodesk.com...
Tony's response reminded me of the Custom Draw API that comes with Civil 3D. The
land desktop point label could be made into an Anonymous Block and then used to
override how Civil 3D shows the point. That way you could keep the point look
the same, but have access to the point in Civil 3D. Probably not as nice of a
solution as Tony came up with. I know Civil 3D comes with some samples for the
Custom Draw API, I haven't messed around with it though.

Christopher

[Anonymous]

Thank you for sharing that, Tony. Quite a clever way of working around the
problem.

Jeff

"Tony Tanzillo" wrote in message
news:6323412@discussion.autodesk.com...
> I've come up with another way of solving the problem
> of moving point labels ....
>
> This also cannot be easily broken by Autodesk without
> also breaking Civil3D and its enabler, so I can share it
> for everyone's benefit:
>
> http://www.caddzone.com/AeccDbCogoPointHelper.zip
>
>

[potpie]

This is a question that is a little different from the ones posted on the thread.. I noticed the other day when i was converting LDD points in a file that I opened in C3D that some of the points shifted from there orig. location.  This was not a shift of equal propotion.. some where a little farther away then anothers and some didn't move at all.. Is there something that I am missing in the conversion process..

Billy

[Jeff_M]

I believe you will see that when the LDT drawing has a BasePoint/NorthRotation set. C3D will always use the Northing/Easting stored with the LDT point and always uses North as up. It's possible that those that "don't move" are close to the Basepoint so they won't appear to move.

I'd be happy to take a look at the file for you if you want.