Figure Lines

[Anonymous]

Hey All,

Can anyone direct me to some indepth quality information pertaining to SURVEY FIGURES? I am in the middle of a figure line nightmare right now.

The way we have been going about adding them to our drawing has caused us to realize that after you break or edit one in any way half of it becomes unnamed and disconnected from the survey data base. Big problem when you rebuild your surface or re import your line work-all of the changes are gone.

So as of now I am adding Figures to my surface in the prospector tab, under the +Survey drop down through a long process of select all, right click in the drawing, isolate selected obj., 3d orbit, adding to survey data base. Its sort of confusing and i need some tutorial action or advice on where to find answers....

Anyone?

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure where to point you for resources.  The truly important stuff about survey figures (nuts and bolts of how to do our job) we've only figured out after extensive trial and error.

Basically, we handle it this way (the order of steps is very important):

1) Import points to drawing

2) Import survey figure linework through the survey database.

3) Edit point codes to get the linework as close to perfect as you see fit (there will sometimes be some things you either can't fix this way, or you can edit faster manually).  Reimport linework as necessary.

4) Make all edits to your figures, and add feature lines as necessary for survey figures that don't look just right (for instance - not all curves look smooth when linework adds them in), or breaklines that need to be added (above what was provided by the crew).

5) Make sure your linework is as close to perfect as possible.

6) Build your surface and add your breaklines.  Realize that any edits you make from now on will have to be added to the surface, or you will need to lock the surface and not let it rebuild itself.

Once you're done with the surface, another way to save all your edits is to export landxml data and reimport it into the drawing, which breaks the link to your figure lines.  It may not always be the best choice, but it seems to work best most of the time, especially when other disciplines get the drawing and want to break all the lines and change everything to different layers. 

Also - the survey database doesn't work (in our estimation - and certainly not without a lot of extra work).  We basically just use it to get our survey figures and breaklines (assuming we don't need to manually edit the figures) into a drawing.  After that, the survey database is worthless to us and we lock the points and surface in the drawing, since that is the only place they really live.  Exporting a text file of the points to a safe place is helpful too.