surface disappeares

[wag24]

Does anyone have a problem with the surface disappearing every once in a while?, or even worse just deleting somehow. Can anything be done about this?

[sinc]

I have never seen that, but I've seen people mention it on the Autodesk newsgroups.

Usually, the question is posed by someone new to C3D. Forum regulars then respond with questions that never get answered, and the OP never posts a follow-up. Since the more-experienced users of C3D never seem to see this problem, I suspect it's due to something that you're doing, but I'm not sure what it might be.

How often have you seen this happen? And what version of C3D?

There was a problem that people had somewhat-often with either 2007 or 2008, I forget which one now, where all the feature lines would disappear from a drawing. They would be there, the user would save and close a drawing, and then the next time the user opened the drawing, all feature lines would be gone, which also impacted any surface built from the (now missing) feature lines. This is another issue I never saw happen myself, though, and I'm not even sure now which version of C3D it was (I think it was 2008 and maybe also 2008 SP1).

[wag24]

I am working with C3D 09..I have moderate experience. The time period increments that the surface disappers or deletes is not uniform. It usually happens with to much "3d activity" AKA. adding network piping or multiple surfaces or both (my case)...ect....in my opinion.

- (SURFACE DELETING)
Today when opening the drawing the "fatal error" message came up. I did a recover and the surface was gone, it did fix errors however. Prior to this in the same drawing last week or so it gave the "command in use cannot save". IN WHAT I'VE SEEN SO FAR THIS CAN'T SAVE PROMPT COMING UP SEEMS TO BE THE BEGGING OF THE PROBLEMS. I used the "_save" and it did save. I opened it a couple times between then and today and had no problems. All of a sudden it can't open, or opens with no surface after a recover.


- (SURFACE DISAPPEARING)-
This is when the prospector reads the surface, but it just won't show up in model space. I try to regen, sometimes it pops up other times it remains invisible.

I eventually plan to use C3D for my primary means of design. It will make things very difficult if this continues...

[davidmatyas]

Can you EXPORT the surface and re-import it?? If all the points and surface data is there, maybe just the instance of the surface definition is corrupt.

[sinc]

You might try turning off Autosave. That seems to make that "A command is in progress" error go away.

Then you just need to train yourself to be in the habit of saving often. It won't help you clean up the problem you are having now, but it might help avoid it in the future. I've kept Autosave turned off since I first started using C3D and discovered the issues with C3D+Autosave, and I haven't seen the problems you are describing.

[wag24]

Ok, i'll look into that.

One other thing that I just though of. We did get our original survey in Microstation then converted it to CAD format. Maybe that's playing a factor in everything, it seems like C3D is thrown off by slight variations from its standard format.

[sinc]

We've had lots of problems with those files. One of the big ones is that attempting to turn the polylines from a Microstation DWG into Feature Lines or Alignments often causes the polylines to vanish, with no feature line being created.

Not sure what to tell you there. We generally just try to work with Microstation DWGs as little as possible, which fortunately is relatively easy for us, since virtually everyone we work with (except the state DOT) is using Autodesk stuff.

One option is to try querying the data into a C3D drawing using Map queries, instead of using Copy to Clipboard or INSERT. But I've had problems with Map queries on Microstation DWGs, too - the big one there is sometimes queried objects come into the C3D drawing in an inverted object coordinate system, so (for example) a contour line might come in at a negative elevation. The really strange thing is that it's sporadic - I might query in all the contours from a Microstation DWG, and only a few come in with negative elevations, while all the rest are fine.

Hopefully the recent partnership between Autodesk and Bentley will help with some of these issues for future versions of the product, but right now there seem to be lots of problems with interoperability. Of course, considering the fact that C3D isn't even compatible with itself from year to year, I'm not sure how much we can realistically expect.

Most of the time for us, we only have to deal with Microstation DWGs (or DGNs) on our DOT projects. And for those, I try to use the linework from the DWG mostly as a reference. If possible, I try to get the XML export out of Microstation for the Alignments, Profiles, and Surfaces, and I import the XML into C3D. Otherwise, due to the problems with creating Alignments and Feature Lines from the Microstation polylines, I often redraw the centerlines of roads, use my new linework to create the Alignments, then key in the Profiles manually.