Locating breaklines amongst many and removing from the surface?

[LeafRiders]

I had some inaccurate survey points in my EG. Now I have new points and breaklines. I'm looking for any suggestions on how to locate thes old breaklines either within the list or visually within my surface editing / style. 

The zoom to doesn't work as there are many breaklines within the zoom extents, and 1000's of breaklines to sift through.  Is there a setting somewhere in the surface where i can turn on the breaklines that have been added already to something that's visible so i can delete those out of my surface?

I'm looking for anything on this one. (Not the obvious answers thought). Delete all and replace all (not happening). Thanks.

[Jeff_M]

Once again I will point you to the SincpacC3D  See THIS post for an answer to a similar question.

[LeafRiders]

In all fairness this is not a solution in any way. Providing a coordinate of a breakline amongst many. Is about as useful as the zoom to command. Autodesk this issue is pretty sad, the fact that you can't turn on breaklines to view within the surface itself like triangles and points so you can add or remove as needed, is a huge oversight. In fact I can't believe this hasn't been added by now. Could this get added to the wish list for 2014.

If you can right-click the breakline in the list in prospector, and go zoom to, why not be able to highlight where it is? Makes zero sense. Why not be able to turn this on in Surface view settings either?

[Neilw_05]

There is no way to graphically select breaklines in a surface definition. This is an item I've added to the wish list. I feel it is a badly needed feature.

[Jeff_M]

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@LeafRiders wrote:

In all fairness this is not a solution in any way. Providing a coordinate of a breakline amongst many. Is about as useful as the zoom to command.

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I think you missed what I was alluding to. If you have the EntityTracker command running and you use the ZoomTo feature for the Breakline to get you in the right vicinity, then moving the cursor over the objects in the display, as you pass over a featureline, or polyline, used as a breakline, that breakline information will display in the EntityTracker palette. In this method you can fairly quickly select the desired one and delete it. I use this method quite often.

Granted, having a Select button in Prospector would be great, but until then this works pretty well.

[dgordon]

I'm not quite sure which breaklines you can't seem to find.   All my surface breaklines are either a feature line or a 3d polyline that exists in my drawing.   So there are no mistery breaklines to go looking for.    If you're referring to the add a line edit to the surface,  I have stopped using that feature since they are so hard to deal with.   I'd rather draw in a 3d poly and add it to the surface then use the add line function.

[fcernst]

I can right-click on it down here and Delete from the surface. I also can Zoom in pretty close if I set my Zoomfactor to 100.

[LeafRiders]

Clearly some understand the complexity of the situation. Clearly some don't. As you can see there's a list of my breaklines, but times that by about 40 sheets of what you see there, all varying in # of vertices. We're not talking about removing 1 Breakline from 1 surface. The zoom to, or right-click select (which selects the entire surface), is what the problem is. Why not add a style to the surface to turn on your breaklines that have been applied.

Those who have 3d polylines or feature lines added, that's nice too. Not all situations warrant 3d breakline applications. Sometimes it's much more practical to add "proximity" breaklines and they are then embedded into the surface. There is no way to remove them without "right-click" add insert into drawing (which would blow this machine up) / not an option.

The other thing I've noticed, if I find the breakline and remove BL320 and go back to remove 321 as that's the one I've unidentified. After you delete 1 breakline, they renumber themselves, so you have to go on the hunt again. Why Autodesk? Assign a breakline a number and keep it assigned don't renumber all the breaklines when 1 is deleted.

[ericcollins6932]

Something I have done for years is to create a surface with current data that totally encompasses the invalid area and then simply paste it in thereby overriding the old surface and winding up with good data.

That may involve going back to the original surface and rebuilding it, sans the offending breaklines.

[Neilw_05]

If I understand your problem correctly, you want to replace certain breaklines in the surface definition with updated versions from a survey. The only ways to do this are to remove entire groups or select and delete individual breaklines within a group. Since there is no graphic feedback when a group or individual breakline is selected, you have no way of knowing whether you have selected the ones you want to delete. What you can do is select a featureline and list it's properties to determine it's breakline and group identity, then go in the surface definition and find it by it's identity properties, but that is far too tedious when there are many breaklines to be updated. In that scenario you'll probably be better off just removing them all and re-adding.

It's a lousy way to work but this is what we have been given.

[fcernst]

 "There is no way to remove them without "right-click" add insert into drawing (which would blow this machine up) / not an option.'

Sounds like no good bookeping practices up front, so maybe you answered your own question as usual and you have to try this.

Lets us know if it smokes! Give the first guy a kick too you got the drawing from who didn't organize and date the decriptions.

You may be able to mitigate the smoke and damage by using surface boundaries, and only import relatively smaller areas at a time...

[Joe-Bouza]

My Mass to Volume ration can be very high at times, but if you know where the new data goes shouldn't the bad data be in direct proximity to it?

[fcernst]

"There is no way to remove them without "right-click" add insert into drawing (which would blow this machine up) / not an option.

The other thing I've noticed, if I find the breakline and remove BL320 and go back to remove 321 as that's the one I've unidentified. After you delete 1 breakline, they renumber themselves, so you have to go on the hunt again."

You can shift-select a whole bunch of breaklines and "not use" them in the surface definition this way also. This way would not affect the numbering like you mention.

[MikeEvansUK]

As Neil suggests I would remove the surface defs and re apply. You can then delete offending breakline with qselect to narrow down the offender. Its often a good idea to wipe and redefine rather than have many defs.

[ralstogj]

My 2 cents select the break line in the drawing press delete and then run oops the line is reinstated in the drawing but removed from the surface as a breakline

[MikeEvansUK]

Didn't know that, I use copy & paste with delete. Kudos to you.

[LeafRiders]

Some valid options here. I ended up going with a wholesale rebuild problem now is all the surface edits applied (swap edge, and add line point etc.) are all erased from the surface. Would need to redo everything. Looks like i'll be going through and trying to remove the breaklines individually that need replacing. At the end of the day, this whole concept is flawed IMO.

[Neilw_05]

If you've done substantial manual edits I'd consider a total recreate as a last resort.

I think the Delete/Oops approach mentioned above is a good way to approximate a graphical solution. Is there some reason why you feel that won't work for you?

[fcernst]

I have another idea, just trying to quickly get to the desired end result of a surface that deletes the old bad data in places and adds new good data in those places.

1. Turn on just the TIN triangles of the old surface with the bad data, that represents all the Face flipping, etc. that has been done.
2. Explode twice to get through Surface and then Block of TIN triangles... down to just TIN triangles.
3. Drop in the new breakline data (make sure you have all the good data on one layer so you can easily isolate and lock it).
4. Then erase the bad data TIN triangles underneath.
5. Define a new "good" surface from the old remaining TIN triangles and the new breaklines.

[LeafRiders]

This approach might work on a small scale, but blowing this up and working with the trainings can't be a good thing. We're talking 20km of road surface.

The approach I'm now going with its to "insert all breaklines" it chugged but eventually went through and inserted all the 3D polylines as my selectable breaklines. I removed the ones I needed to redefine. The problems I'm having here, involve an overlap of a pasted surface (an area that was corrected survey and I redid it and pasted into the EG surface as a result). Now the new surface I need to add is in both areas of the original EG and the area where I have a 2nd surface that was pasted into the EG.

Out of curiosity, once I paste a surface into my EG, does the EG keep this data independently after it's added. If edit the EG will the pasted surface EG2 become outdated. Are they linked together? If I edit one will the other update. Just trying to get a grasp on exactly which areas I need to ensure are rebuilt. I'm guessing I'll need to remove the old breaklines from both and maybe just add the update to the EG to get this done with. I'd hate to have to update the EG2 so it would apply to EG considering there's overlap.

As for the mess... "Garbage in = Garbage out" no need to "edit" survey data if it was done right in the first place.