Summary: You can promote a shortcut(ed) surface in Civil 3D, but I'd like a way to promote surfaces that reside in the drawing itself, basically applying all edits, removing links to the objects that created it, and leaving behind a simple tin.
Description: So, if I have a surface that is a hybrid of many separate surfaces that reside in the current drawing, that I want to send to someone else, and I don't want them to have all the pieces, but just a tin, I want a quick way to apply all those pasted surfaces and remove all the edit history and just have a plain tin, like a promoted surface. Sure, I can extract the tin lines and make a new surface using autocad objects, but that takes time. Or, I can shortcut it out, start a new drawing and make a reference and then promote that, but that takes time as well. It would be somewhat analogous to the "collapse stack" functionality in 3D Studio where you take all the modifiers on a certain object and apply them and you are left with a dumb mesh.
Product and Feature: AutoCAD Civil 3D - Surface Modeling
Submitted By: J Amos on 08/15/2013