Civil3D surface data to GIS

[watersam]

I do a lot of hydraulic modeling and create river bed surface datafrom surveyed points.  I need to be able to transfer the surface data from Civil3D to GIS effectively.  The issue is that GIS does not maintain the fidelity of my surface based on the breaklines I've drawn.  It triangulates based on vertices and often triangulates through the feature lines.  In LDD, I was able to do address this by adding vertices to my 3D polylines in a batch-type function.  That is, I could select all of my 3D polylines and add vertices to them at the same time.  In Civil3D, I have to add vertices to each feature line individually. 

Does anyone know of a way to add vertices to feature lines, or to a surface, in a more efficient manner that maintains fidelity of surface data in the transfer from Civil3D to GIS?

Thanks,

Sam

[Murph_Map]

That option has been there for a number of releases (2005) and unlike some things from the old school MAP it hasn't been removed yet. Now if and when a new export engine comes out that can handle some of the new objects in ACAD and C3D objects look for it to get dropped if the adsk devolopers follow suit like they have been.

[watersam]

THanks, Murph.  I've tried this very method before, but was not able to get the results I needed to see. It may be that it works well with the "densify polyline" command I just found in GIS, so I'll have to try it again, as it's one or two steps shorter than Eric's solution.  Thanks to all for the responses.  I was hung up on this issue for a little while.

Sam

[watersam]

Turns out this was the answer and I've been using it for some time.  Extract the triangles from the surface, mapexport them and bring them into GIS as a shapefile, use them to create a surface with "hard line" interpolation.  That last step is the key to maintaining the fidelity of the triangles.

Sam

[Hidden_Brain]

in addition to all the great suggestions above, if you are using ArcMap 10, you can also export your Civil 3D TIN surface as LandXML and then use the LandXML file to create a ArcMap TIN. Since you are already dealing with surfaces in ArcMap, I assume that you have a 3D Analyst license.