Siteless gradings and featurelines

[Neilw_05]

Sometimes we don't want gradings or featurelines to interact with each other. Currently the only way to do this is to move them to different sites. There are a couple of problems with this.

1) Since these types of objects can only reside in one site they cannot be shared with objects in other sites. For example we might use an edge of pavement featureline to create a planar surface that underlays adjacent parking stalls so we can drape the parking stall curbs and peninsulas onto the surface. We don't want the parking stall featurelines to interact with that draping surface, so we have to put them on a separate site. But we also need to include that edge of pavement featureline in the finished model, so it needs to be used in both the drape surface site and the parking stall site, which we cannot do.

2) When working with planar draping surfaces such as above, we usually need to extend the drape surface beyond the objects that we want to drape to ensure that they fall within the surface. In some cases this reqires that those drape surfaces overlap each other, yet we don't want them interacting. Again we have to create different sites for all those surfaces to prevent that. When I've encountered these scenarios it becomes a nightmare to manage all the gradings and featurelines and sites to prevent them from interacting.

If we could have the option to have siteless objects so they don't interact at all we could eliminate both of these problems. I think it would make more sense to have siteless objects as the default. It would eliminate so many problems that users have with the current paradigm. Only when we do want things to interact would we choose to put them in a common site.

Remember when alignments had to be in sites? It solved so many problems when they became siteless.