Help creating Surface from the file attached

[b00026774157345]

good evening,

right now i am civil engineer student who is supposed to design a road profile and give the full details, the university provided us with civil3D, i myself have experince working with autocad for the past 6 years so i can easily catch up on any advice given, now we have this map with contours and all but i cant seem to create a surface layer so i can create a profile from it, like the horizontal alignment. do you guys have any idea how i can do it with this file i attached. the contour drawings are there but civil 3d doesnt recognize it as elevations.

thank you :)

[sinc]

Wow... Is this the unchanged source file? It wasn't supposed to have a pre-created C3D Surface in it by chance, was it?

What classes exactly have you been taking? Have you been learning C3D for a while? Or did some instructor just say "You're supposed to be able to do this task with C3D, so go try..."?

It's true, you can do this task with C3D. But the data you were given is a mess. All you have are the contours, in the form of polylines at elevation. This is the worst possible source of information for creating a Surface... Ideally, you would have been given a LandXML file containing the surface, or TIN triangles that you could use to recreate the surface. But, you can use contours, it just introduces the most error.

You could conceivably fix a bunch of that error by adding in the spot elevations. But unfortunately, those were exploded into a form that makes them difficult to add to a C3D surface, without manually creating new points for each individual spot elevation. And to top it all off, it looks like your contours were exaggerated 2x, so they're all at the wrong elevations.

All of these problems can be fixed, and you can end up creating your Profile. But this seems like a rather advanced task... It almost looks to me like you were supposed to get a file that had a C3D Surface already pre-created in it. The data that's in there now looks like it might have come from a C3D Surface that had display set to 2x exaggeration, then the Surface was exploded. If you had the original C3D Surface, rather than the mess of data that's now in this drawing, all you'd need to do is sample the Surface, and your EG Profile would simply be there.

But to top it all off, I notice there appear to be no Styles in your drawing... Attempting to use C3D without pre-created Styles is very frustrating. I'm wondering what exactly your instructor is trying to teach you... Are you trying to learn roadway design, or how to use C3D? The problem being, of course, that you can't use C3D to learn roadway design until you understand the basics of how to work in C3D. So you need some level of C3D training first.

[sinc]

Oh, and it looks like there may yet another problem, although a minor one...

Notice how all the contour elevations are just slightly-off of 2x what they should be? For example, the 660 contour is at elevation 1319.995, instead of right at elevation 1320. This looks like, at some point, the Surface data got reprocessed by someone who mixed up International Feet and US Survey Feet. The data is off by just about the amount that would be expected if you had data in US Survey Foot, and someone had some setting wrong, and some software (possibly C3D) applied an International Foot to US Survey Foot conversion.

Since 1,000,000 International Feet = 999,998 US Survey Feet, this has a minimal impact on elevations. But it would explain why all your contours are approx. 0.005' below the true 2x elevation. This error would have no significant impact on the design, but it's an error that should not be made. If you mix up US Survey Feet and International Feet with State Plane Coordinates, for example, you can get yourself into serious trouble.

[b00026774157345]

Wow O.O.... i cant believe the professor actually gave us something like that haha, we are actually trying to learn roadway design using the software, we were given a basic introduction on what to do on the software but with what ur saying there is now way ill be able to manage a surface and create a profile. I guess ill have to tell him we need a whole new state of data.

but by any chane can you try creating a surface and resending me the file, or is it going to be a really long process? i mean if you can do it in like 5 min please do but if its not possible then thank you :D

[sinc]

Yes, it's relatively easy, just something I'm surprised you'd need to do...

In order to fix it, I put all your contours and spot elevs into a block, then scaled the block by (1,1,.5) and exploded it. That got everything to the correct elevation (well, except for that little bit of error I mentioned, which looks like it may have been caused by a US Survey Foot vs. International Foot issue at some point).

I then ran a MAPCLEAN on the lines to join the contours into nice polylines, and added those to your EG surface as contour data. You already had your Alignment set to sample the surface, so as soon as I added the contour data to the EG surface, your EG Profile appeared. All I had to do was create a Profile View, so you could see it.

The website wouldn't let me post the result (file too big), so I posted it here:

http://www.ejsurveying.com/downloads/CVE363_Sp11_Project_map.dwg

[sinc]

Oh, and I didn't add the spot elevations. All I did was add the contour data. The spot elevations are relatively irrelevant for your task, though, since they won't change the EG surface enough to really impact what you're doing.

[b00026774157345]

i dont have the words to thank you :'), you really did motivate me to learn this program now shall out the full effort in it :D