Crazy contour - what am I doing wrong?

[elaine3051]

Every 9 months we need to build a Proposed site. It doesn't give me enough practice to problem solve. I have included a PNG of contour issues I can't seem to solve. This is the north end of a proposed equipment storage building. The North and east side have 5' @ 2% slope. Then there is a 4:1 to existing ground. The inside of the building has a 1% slope from south to north. This was built with feature lines and grading objects. What the heck is all the wiggly in my  gold contour line? I have tried to change contour smoothing. Does this have to do with tesselation settings? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Joe-Bouza]

Pretty tough to determine from a screen grab, but the fan in the right corner looks suspicious to me

[doni49]

Select your triangles or a contour.  Then right-click and choose "Object Viewer".  This will allow you to spin it around and look at just the surface from all angles.  I'm betting you'll see some serious spikes.  At the ends of those spikes are likely to be some blown points of some type.  And as Joe said, that fan looks really suspicous -- I'm betting that one or more spikes will be at that location.

If you need more help, try posting your dwg file -- if it's too large, try eliminating anything that's not part of the surface (after doing a save as first of course).

[conormccartney3897]

Also try clearing out the surface definition and rebuilding, im seeing a TIN line in between the feature lines that probably shouldnt be there.

[brian.strandberg]

Looks like an area where a surface smooth edit would help....

[cwitzel]

 A couple of things.  When you add your breaklines, make sure you use some Supplementing Factors.  We usually use distance 5 and Mid ordinate .10.  This also a greater number of triangles.

The reson your contours are squigly is because the large number of triangles coming from the corner to another breakline.  Each of these traingles is at a different angle thus the surface moves up and down slightly.

Another quick option that you can try is a Smoothing Edit.  for Area select either an area or the whole surface.  We usually use 5 or ten feet.  Denser is not always better.

Hope that helps.

Conan Witzel