AutoCAD® Civil 3D® - Survey Fix Tool
Have you ever been expected to produce a Civil 3D® drawing for example, using a flat survey? If you have you'll know exactly why I've created this tool.
Sometimes we will have a survey represented by a series of 2D objects. Often this is a Point or Block object with a nearby Text or MText object. There are tools in Civil 3D® to elevate the Text or MText, however it will not use the nearby Point object as the base point, but rather it will use the base point of the text because Civil 3D® has no way of knowing which point is associated with which Text or MText object. That way degrades the quality of the survey data - it is far more desirable to use the position of the points in combination with the associated elevation shown in the Text or MText.
My new tool solves this problem, by elevating Point or Block objects to the height of the nearest Text or MText entity. I've given a brief example in the video below to show you how to use it.
If you cannot watch the video, you'll need to know the basics. You will need to load the dll file with the command NETLOAD. This should add the command SURVEYFIX to AutoCAD®. Run this command and you will be prompted to select the entities you want to fix. Select any Point, Block, Text or MText entities that you want to elevate. The tool will detect any ambiguous points - simply follow the prompts as instructed, tweaking the source data as required.
You can download the .NET module (dll file) below, which should work from 2010 upwards.
Please do subscribe to my blog if you found this useful - I plan to start adding a whole suite of new tools!
Will
Comments
Duncan Brannan
2011-02-27 16:12:39
Will,
This is a great tool... however, when i use it i have more than 4513 confusable objects to check which isnt great. I'm sure you will agree...
When selecting an entire survey site i have alot of points to double check, however if i zoom into an area i can get rid of them using the tool again but it is one by one. Anyway you could look into this?
Any chance the tool can be more accurate when it picks up the blocks, points or text?
Regards,
Duncan
Will
2011-02-27 21:43:43
Hi Duncan - Thanks for subscribing to my site.
The problem when trying to detect the associated text entity to a point (or block) entity, is that it is not necessarily the nearest point. There are sometimes unpredictable ambiguities in the data which are unfortunately much more difficult to automatically fix.
However, there are some things you can perhaps check you are doing to ensure the minimum number of confusable objects. Make sure you are only selecting the items you need to work with - if you're selecting extra objects, the tool will try and match up everything with a text object, which will result in duplication - which is the trigger for a "confusable" point.
Similarly, make sure that the number of points (or block) you have selected exactly match the corresponding number of text (or mtext) entities. This is fairly obvious because you can only have one text object per point.
It might be helpful if you email the dwg file to me so I can see exactly what you're dealing with. It might be possible for me to tweak the tool if there's something obvious I've overlooked. My email address can be found on the "Contact Me" section of this site.
Will
Viv Howe
2011-06-01 08:14:02
Just a small point about using this routine, you need to locate the .dll file on your local hard drive, it will crash Autocad / Civil3d if used off a network drive. Thanks for a very useful tool.
Will
2011-06-21 09:02:46
Absolutely right - this is actually a .NET framework thing for security. DLL files must be local.
Thanks for pointing this out :-)
Ziggy
2014-04-10 22:55:34
Hi Will,
Can you please advise whether your SurveyFix should work with Civil 3d 2013? I am unable to load it using NETLOAD.
Thanks.