Corridor Surface Issues (Contour Editing, Object Viewer, etc.)

[Ibarra10]

I was trying to edit a corridor surface manually by editing points and tin lines but for me its much easier to edit the contours itself so I explode the surface into polylines and fix the contour issues but when i make it into a new surface the Surface does not look clean anymore. When I look at it in the object viewer it looks rough and jagged and doesn't look like a road at all, however my original corridor surface did look clean with perfect roads and cul de sacs i just wanted to fix the contours outside the road. I tried extracting it like i should have done in the first place but when i add the contours to a surface it still looks ugly and jagged. Another thing is that when you look at it in 2D or plan view the contours look exactly the same but when i look at it from a perspective view or 3D that's when you see the difference. Does anyone have a trick for this. I will post up pics.

[Ibarra10]

Here are the 2 surfaces in 3D or perspective view. The Original Corridor Surface has a hole in the left corner and i don't why but that is the primary reason i wanted to manually edit it.

[mathewkol · Accepted solution]

You're going about things in a way that is far from a best practise.  It's no surprise at all that you're getting a crappy surface from that workflow.  A surface made from contours is about the worst surface you can get.  A wise man once said "All contours are lies"...or something like that.  Contours are simply display features and should never be used to create that surface unless that's the only data you have.

I re-read that first paragraph and it sounds a little harsh, maybe even condescending.  I DO NOT mean it this way, I just can't think of a better way to say it.  Sorry.

Anyway, you need to fix your corridor so that the contours work out the way you want.  If that is not possible and you need to make manual edits,  Follow this workflow.

1. Make a new surface.
2. Paste the corridor surface into it.
3. Make any edits to this surface.
4. One trick you can use for your contours is to extract the contours from the surfce (no need to explode...search for extracting objects from a surface to learn how).  Then grab the contours you want to fix and delete the rest.
5. Make your edits to those extracted contours.
6. Add them to the new surface as contour data.  This way, those new contours are an "addition" to the original data and not just replacing that data.

Good luck.

[Ibarra10]

This surface was not originally made by contours. A surveying company went out to the field got the data gave our company the data and basically made points out of that data that then we made into a surface but displaying in contours. And like I said i already tried extracting instead of exploding and it didn't work either. I also tried what you said of pasting in the edited surface but that didn't work either.

[wesleyEYYR5]

Ibarra,

I had an issue with object viewer displaying jagged lines throughout the surface.  What was causing this was the command "Level of Detail" was turned on. After turning "level of detail" off the object viewer displayed perfectly. 

Wesley Hoge - Senior Designer