How can I show New Contours tying into Existing Contours?

[bryancollins3174]

I have an EG surface, FG Surface, and a combined FG-EG Surface.

The FG-EG Surface was created by pasting in the EG Surface first & then the FG Surface.

I need to know how I can make the FG Surface Contours show by themselves until they tie into the EG Surface Contours.  Because when I created the FG-EG Surface all the EG and FG Contours became the 1' & 5' Design Contours, the EG contours don't show as existing. 

I remember In LDT 2006, when you pasted a surface it just replaced the existing contours with the new contours and their boundary where they overlapped and kept the existing contours everywhere else. I've search all through the Search DB and haven't found anything yet.  Can't seem to find anything through Google either, but I'm sure this has been addressed before and I'm probably using the word search words or something.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Bryan Collins

CADD Technician

Windows XP w/ SP3 (3GB switch)

Civil 3D 2010 w/ SP3 & SAP

[AllenJessup]

Just to show on the plan I'd copy the outer boundary of your FG surface and use it as a hide boundary for your EG surface. Then you can show each surface in whatever style you want. Or you could make another copy of your EG-FG surface and do the same thing.

Allen

[bryancollins3174]

Probably a very dumb question, but how do you copy the Outer boundary of one to use in another surface?

[AllenJessup]

If you don't have an Outer Boundary as part of your FG Surface definition, you'll have to create one. If one exist in the definition but doesn't show in the drawing go to the Surface definition on the Prospector tab, highlight Boundaries under the Definition. The boundaries should appear below. Rt-clk on the Outer Boundary and select Insert to Drawing.

Now you can make a copy of the boundary and use it as a Hide Boundary for the EG Surface.

Allen

[bryancollins3174]

Okay so you are saying that I have to manually create an outer boundary for my FG surface?  I thought there would be a way once I created the FG surface so I could just export an outer boundary. And even if I do get an outer boundary for the FG to use as a hidden boundary for the EG then I'll have a hole in my Existing Conditions drawing which references the EG surface only.  Or are you saying that I'm going to have to create yet another surface with the EG and hidden boundary?

This is a small project and if I have to go through and create all these surfaces for it, then Civil 3D will die on me when I start working on a much larger project with much larger surfaces.

Could you write out step-by-step instructions?  I'm obviously miss understanding some things.

[AllenJessup]

I'm afraid you've reached my limit on where to go from here. I've haven't had to deal with the situation yet. I gave you the first solution I would have tried if I had to do it. The second job, where I did do grading plans, never got out of LDT.

Hopefully someone with more experience than me will chime in with a better solution.

Allen

[bryancollins3174]

Thanks anyways.  Hopefully someone else will come along.  I never ever thought that this part of the project would be so difficult.  This is usually the easiest. 

[Sinc]

I remember this issue first coming up when we were on C3D 2007...  If you search this newsgroup hard enough, you should find posts on it.  Unfortunately, nothing has changed inside of C3D this entire time, so the problem is as alive now as it was back then.

What we really need is a way to have FG surfaces automatically hide EG surfaces.  We also need to be able to customize the "tie in", similar to the "rounding parameter" available in some of the Subassemblies, so that we get a nice little tie of FG contours into EG contours.

Unfortunately, we still have none of this functionality in C3D.  So if you don't want to use a Hide boundary, there's only one other option I know of.  In your FG surface, turn on the Elevations display (in addition to your contours), and set it so that displays one solid color of 255.  This is essentially like a white hatch.  Then, position Draw Order for your surfaces so that your EG Surface is way in the back of everything else, and the FG Surface is right on top of it.  The "Color 255" elevation display will hide the EG Surface underneath your FG Surface.  The nice thing about this is the Elevation display remains dynamic to your surface, so it will change automatically in response to any edits to your FG Surface.  The drawbacks are that it looks bad in modelspace, and your FG and EG contours will often not tie together exactly (due to the way TINs work, and especially when using Corridors to create your FG Surface).  It also complicates Draw Order issues, since you have to make sure to maintain the correct Draw Order for your Surfaces in relation to everything else.

[bryancollins3174]

Thanks Sinc.  Guess I now know my options...LDT anyone?  There are still a few things that LDT did better and easier than Civil 3D.  This is definitely one of them.  Like I said before, it always seems to be the most common sense things that Civil 3D misses on.

Since I am trying to keep all my Plan Sheets in one drawing I believe I'm now going to have to make some adjustments.  I believe I'll be able to do the following to get what I need...I think.

If I DREF in my EG surface into my ExistingConditions xref and label the contours there then they will show correctly when XREF'ed into my Existing Conditions Plan (Plan Sheets.dwg) and frozen in the viewframes throughout each plan sheet in the drawing. 

Next, I can DREF in my EG_Hidden Boundary surface into the Plan Sheets.dwg for use with my FG surface in my Proposed Grading Plan (Plan Sheets.dwg). 

I will still have to DREF in EG surface (set to _No Display) for use with my Sanitary Sewer and Storm Drainage Profiles (due to the fact that Civil 3D doesn't DREF profile gradeline linetypes correctly).

It's definitely going to take some thinking to get everything to look right.

Thanks again Allen & Sinc.  If anyone comes up with a different/better way then please add to this post.  Autodesk needs to add an additional option alongside Accepted Solution called Accepted Solution for Now or Temporary Solution.

[peterfunkautodesk]

I see two simple ways to do this with Civil 3D:

1. Select the FG surface and on the ribbon use the "Extract Object" command and extract the boundary of the FG surface. Then add that boundary to the EG surface as a hide boundary. This is easy to do, but the boundary that was extracted isn't dynamic and would need to be updated if the FG surface changes

2. Set the display of the EG surface to "No Display" and set the display of the FG/EG surface to your EG style and move it to the bottom of the display pile. What this will do is draw the FG surface on top of the FG/EG surface making the display that you are looking for. This display will be dynamic, but you may need to adjust the draw order from time to time. It also produces duplicate contours for the existing ground within the FG.

Cheers,

Peter Funk

Autodesk, Inc.

[ralstogj]

Hi

As Peter discussed extract the boundary and use "convertlineworktomaskblock" command to mask the contours not hide section in the surface its self.

Regards

Justin Ralston