Analysis tool showing contour line at cursor

[Anonymous]

In the process of transitioning to Civil 3D from GeoPak, and the main downside I see is the loss of our most used analysis tool. In GeoPak it is called the "Height / Slope" tool.

Something like this in Civil 3D would be amazingly helpful.

When you have it enabled, there are 3 options for the display. 

1- Everywhere you move your cursor shows the contour line for the elevation you are over. 

2- Option to show the triangle determining the slope just for where the cursor is.

3- A large arrow points in the direction of flow.

Any/all of the above can be on at once.

The tool window gives you the x, y, and z coordinates along with the percent slope.

See attached photos for the window and default display in a model.

This is incredibly helpful for checking a grading model as well as seeing where your overflow point is from one drainage basin to the next.

Wherever that contour line goes from one closed shape to opening into another area is the first place the water will overflow. Will the water back up into the building or downhill to the next inlet? This is a really quick and effective way to figure that out all without adding any lines or text to your model.

[Anonymous]

I think the INQUIRY tool will let you do most of this and more. In terms of seeing the triangles, the only way I know of is to toggle on/off the display in Surface Style. I wish there was a quicker way to do this, but you get used to it.

[Anonymous]

The inquiry tool has a variation on this information, but with nowhere near the functionality for quick analysis.

It requires changing the displays in your drawing, using multiple inquiry tools, and adding actual text to your model.

The beauty of the height/slope tool is that it is basically a single click tool that displays all of the needed analysis information at once without adding anything to your model,changing the display of your surface, or filling the whole model display with hundreds of triangles.

No need to change the surface display at all, no need to click every individual point you want to assess. This is especially helpful on the 50+ acre sites, but helpful on even tiny sites. Being in commercial site development, corridors are hardly used, and analyzing accessibility and drainage of sites mostly modeled with feature lines with this tool is handy.

The best part, though, is the dynamic contour following your cursor at whatever elevation you are over.

I think this is one of those things that if you never had it you don't know what you're missing. As someone that is going to be losing it, I think this would be a great resource for those using Civil 3D.

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous, I see now what you're saying. Yes, I can see how having a dynamic functionality like this would be nice.

[TerryDotson]

Does this tool remain active through subsequent commands or does it require you to stop it before moving on to other commands?

[Anonymous]

You don't have to tell it to stop, but if you draw a line or something it will stop showing. However, the window remains open so it is a single click to start showing it again.

Attached is a clip of the drawing I am in right now. The white is the dynamic analysis following my cursor. The orange lines are my feature lines and breaklines. If I click one of my tool buttons, it will stop displaying the white lines. To restart, all I have to do is click "Start" in the Height/Slope window.

[TerryDotson]

I thought the basic concept was interesting but as usual, I did it my way.

The question now is how to start and stop, not a big fan of the large dialog GeoPak displayed.

[Anonymous]

The one thing I would add to that is the ability to see the whole contour for an elevation.

Like in the image attached to my previous comment, the white line is everywhere in the model that is at elevation 627.326

But as a quick concept, I like what you showed!

[TerryDotson]

The problem with the whole contour is while Civil3D has a reasonably fast FindTriangleAtXY to find a triangle at a point (the cursor) there is (to my knowledge at this time) no neighbor information.  Building a neighbor index of all the triangles would take time, significant time if it's a large area with small triangles, etc.  So time-wise it's currently not practical to build that for the limited benefit.  In it's current implementation you could hold shift and move in the general direction the contour runs to show them.