C3D 2012 Feature lines as breaklines issue

[icie.washington]

We recently upgraded from 2010 to 2012, and I am having trouble with my surface. I created feature lines for my breaklines and added them to the surface as I always do. But for some reason, with 2012, the contours are crossing the breaklines and I can't find a way to eliminate this. Has something changed in terms of how I need to edit a surface? I checked the help, and I couldn't find anything to assist me. I know this is a simple question, but I haven't had this much trouble finessing a surface since C3D 2008 or 2009. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks.

Civil 3D 2012

Win 7 Pro 64 bit, 8 GB RAM

Intel Xeon E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10 GHz

Dell T1650

[tcorey]

Usually we would need to see your drawing file so we can inspect the area where there's a problem.

Regarding the feature lines you added as breaklines, were these created in 2010 or 2012? If they were created in 2010, you might want to re-create in 2012 and try again.

Another possiblity is that you have crossing breaklines that are not being added. What other data do you have besides breaklines? Did you create from contours? Those are considered breaklines, too, so adding a feature line would cause a crossing and the feature line would not be added to the surface.

A good check would be to allow crossing breaklines in Surface Properties (Definition tab, expand Build and you'll find the option.) If the TIN now follows the breakline, it was added, which makes one think it wasn't added before because of a crossing.

[Joe-Bouza]

When you add the FL to the surface do you adjust the supplemental distance and mid ordinate distance? I suggest a smaller number than you average vertices spacing for supplemental (for me 10' seems to work pretty well) and the mid ordinate I use 0.01 for finer triangulation around curves

[mathewkol · Accepted solution]

Contours cross breaklines all the time. This is perfectly normal. It's not the job of breaklines to prevent contours from crossing them. TIN lines on the other hand should not cross breaklines. Contours most certainly can and do cross breaklines.

[tcorey]

I thought he must have meant TIN lines were crossing breaklines.

[mathewkol]

We'll see when he posts back. I "said" contour so I am oblighed to believe him until I hear otherwise 🙂

[Joe-Bouza]

I read between the line too.

[icie.washington]

Thank you all for your responses. I am attaching the file. In the file, you can see that the contours are crossing over the sidewalk, which seems new to me. At least, I don't recall it being this way so much in the previous version.

In answer to all the posts:

a) The surface, feature lines, and breaklines were all created in 2012. I created the breaklines from polylines, not contours.

b) I do adjust the mid ordinate distance on my breaklines to .25 because of the curves. 

c) My tin lines aren't crossing the breaklines, but it seems that the contours are crossing more than it used to.

Maybe it's the location of my job, maybe I'm just being too sensitive to what the contours are doing, but I just want to be sure that I am not overlooking some new change with this version.

[dgordon · Accepted solution]

I opened the drawing and saw that the surface is built from points and breaklines only.   The OP only added two feature lines as breaklines and they do not increase the amount of contours crossing the breakline areas.   Just to see if anything would happen I erased the feature lines and let the surface rebuild.   Hardly anything changed.   a few triangles got flipped back to the way they were before the breaklines prevented them from crossing.   The contours however did not change in any noticable ways.   I hope I can lay the OP's fears to rest here.    There doesn't seem to be anything unusual happening here.

[icie.washington]

Thanks for taking a look at it. I just wanted to be sure.

[mathewkol]

Indeed, as I said in my post, contours cross breaklines all the time, it's perfectly normal.  Every situation is different.  if you weren't seeing that before, then it was just different situations.  There's nothing wrong with your contours here.