The new surface build option in 2013 for maximum triangle angle is halfway there. It is good for surfaces created from grading or corridors where internal trinagles are fairly regular, but fails surveyors completely.
Surveyors have been waiting a long time for a shrinkwrap tool for surveyed surfaces. The maximum triangle angle is a good start but needs a couple of more rules applied:
1. Work its way from the outside until, so as not to affect any internal triangles with large internal angles.
2. Not to remove trianles past survey figures used as breaklines.
If a shrinkwrap command like this was put in Civil3D there would be a lot of happy surveyors. Other programs have been doing this at least 15yrs in my experience.
Thanks for the suggestion Steve, but as the command name suggest LINEWORKSHRINKWRAP puts a shrink-wrapped polyline around linework, not a surface.
When used on a surface with either triangles or boundary displayed it shrink-wraps the total extents and does not weed out any triangles, leaving you right where you started. If only contours are showing then the command fails. It is not much good using on surveyed breaklines either as it ignore points, and creates all sorts of polylines around intersecting survey figures.
According to the release comaparison matrix, Civil3D 2013 has a new "surface shrinkwrap boundary" command, but this is only for adding boundaries to corridors (and I believe makes use of the "maximum angle" build option).
We currently use a combination of Maximum triangle length (to get rid of unwanted supersized triangles) and Delete lines (to get rid of smaller unwanted triangles). I hoped that Maximum angle would complemented the Maximum triangle length to avoid having to delete so many triangles.
But once that is done there is no point to creating any boundary, by shrink-wrap or other means, but it would make the surface definition less complicated and easier to work with at the cost of some extra upfront work.
I had requested the shrinkwrap boundary for design, not for surveying. See http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/AutoCAD-Civil-3D-Wishes/Surface-Boundary-Hide/m-p/3297823.
The use that you wish to use it, is different from what I intended to it for.
Yes it will be a really useful command to have with design surfaces. But if Autodesk had given just a little bit of thought to its potential for wider application, then it would not be a big step to tweak it to work with more irregular surveyed surfaces (still useful for say LIDAR data).
Here's to hoping. 2014?
Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.