Topic: ( C3D ) FBK import to Point Group...?

[sinc]

When I import a field book, I can get a Survey Network and/or Survey Points and Figures inserted into my drawing.  No problem there.  But is there any way to have all those newly-created points get added to a point group as part of the process?

I can always create a point group and manually add the points after the Fieldbook import, but it seems there should be a way to automatically do this during the import, as when importing a CSV file...

[Dent Cermak]

Hit the update tab in the point Group manager.

[sinc]

Hit the update tab in the point Group manager.

I may not understand, but that doesn't seem to do anything...

Basically, I may already have point groups in the drawing.  When I import a FBK file, the points get added to the "All Points" group, but I want to add them to another group that I specify (either an existing Point Group, or a brand new Point Group, depending on the situation).

It would be the same thing as the "Add Points to Point Group" option in the "Import Points" command.

[Dinosaur]

Getting points to come into the drawing in the correct point group has been one of the more difficult things to figure out.  I can get it to work correctly only if I have the point group set up first with the parameters in place that determine how it will be populated.  This seems to work best if they are sorted by descriptions or elevation ranges.

[sinc]

Getting points to come into the drawing in the correct point group has been one of the more difficult things to figure out.  I can get it to work correctly only if I have the point group set up first with the parameters in place that determine how it will be populated.  This seems to work best if they are sorted by descriptions or elevation ranges.

Basically, you're saying it's another hole in the program...   

I'll send a feature request to Autodesk.  As you say, I can probably work around the problem most of the time, until they fix it.

[Dent Cermak]

Usually when I add points into an existing dwg and i want to add the new opoints to the point groups, I just select the goup, right click, pick "properties" and then "apply" and the new points are added.
Also if I bring in the new points  and then open the Point Group Manager, the groups that have not been updated have a red line through them. if I hit the update tab (3rd or 4th tab from the left) those groups are updated with the new points.

[sinc]

Usually when I add points into an existing dwg and i want to add the new opoints to the point groups, I just select the goup, right click, pick "properties" and then "apply" and the new points are added.
Also if I bring in the new points  and then open the Point Group Manager, the groups that have not been updated have a red line through them. if I hit the update tab (3rd or 4th tab from the left) those groups are updated with the new points.

I don't understand that.

It almost sounds like you have setup your point group properties so that they key off the descriptions, or something.  So that every time you add points, they automatically get added to point groups, which are already part of surfaces, or something like that.  Does that sound close to what you're doing?  We don't do that, because we often want to create multiple EG surfaces in the same drawing, and we can't have them get "mushed together".  So we don't do things that way.  For example, we might go out and do a topo survey, then go and do another topo survey of the same sight after the guys move dirt, and calculate a quantity.  We can't have field shots from the "after" getting added to the "before" surface.

I can create a point group AFTER the FBK import, and add the new points to it manually, but my basic problem is how to specify which points to add to the point group.  For example, say we've already gone out and located a bunch of points.  Now the field guy goes out and takes more shots.  The new shots overlap with the old shots.  I want to pull in the new shots, and add it to the others, but I also want to keep the new shots in their own point group (I've learned from past experience that this is a good idea).  How do I add the new points to the point group?  I have a lot of points already in the drawing, so I can't just select a big area and add the points.  How do I know which points just came in?

A lot of times, the points that come in are in a certain point number range.  So I can usually just add points by point number.  But there are cases when things aren't so simple.  It would just be a lot easier if I could specify "As these points are imported from the FBK, put them in this point group," rather than having to do it by point number.

[sinc]

Actually, I think I can get around that mess by figuring out how Point Group Visibility works.

I've had some trouble figuring out how Point Display works.  I finally figured out that there's a bug in there - when using Point Layer to control the display of Points, the Point will get its Color, Linetype, and Lineweight from the Point Layer, but it gets its Plot Style and Plot/NoPlot settings from Layer 0.  This caused me a LOT of grief until I finally figured it out.

And I think it might be more complicated than that - it might not actually be Layer 0 that it gets its properties from, but the Point Group Layer.  (I had the Point Group on Layer 0 for most test so far.)

This whole "controlling the display of Points and Point Labels" is incredibly convoluted.  I need to mess around with it more.  Now that I know about that one bug, I think it might start making more sense...  Autodesk definitely did not make this part easy for the user.

[Dinosaur]

We are currently giving each point group its own layer, point and label style and point everything for each group to the same layer.  Technically, the points are all tied to a single points layer and csame with all labels, but if those layers are left alone we can control visibility and wheter or not they will plot.

[sinc]

Yehaw!   

I finally managed to work around that bug, and do everything I want!  In order to do it, I had to create a new point group, my "ForceNoPlot" point group.  While working on a drawing, I keep this ForceNoPlot Point Group set below the AllPoints point group in the Point Group precedence list.

For the rest of it, I'm assigning Point and Point Label styles via the Description Key Manager.  Depending on what kind of point it is, the properties are different - this is mostly controlled by the Point Style.  Key groups of points (edge of pavement shots, generic terrain shots, etc.) are placed on the same layer by the Point Style.  Therefore, we can turn on and off certain groups of points using the Layer controls.  This allows for easy flipping of large groups of points, each of which may have different Point Styles.

Then, in order to print, we flip the Point Group precedence so that the ForceNoPlot point group takes precedence over the AllPoints point group.  This sidesteps the bug, and causes everything to print right.

I've included 2D, 3D, and Plot views of a portion of a drawing.  For those unfamiliar with Civil-3D, you may want to know that, now that I have all the styles set up, there is very little work involved in creating these drawings.  All I do is import the FBK file, which creates all linework.  Then I add the points and breaklines to a surface (each step is basically one simple command), and select the display properties for the surface.  Then I pop in the Contour Label control lines and a couple of other labels.  That's it.  Takes maybe 15 minutes to do this entire drawing.  The 3D view is simply a 3D-Orbit of the Plan view (the trees are multi-view blocks that get inserted via the Description Keys).

This drawing also exports relatively well to Land Desktop.  It'd probably confuse the hell out of a Land Desktop person, though, 'cause they'd be wondering how in the hell I managed it...   

[sinc]

Oh, sorry guys, I didn't realize those pics would actually show up in the post.  I thought they'd just be links.

Let me know if I should change it, so they are links instead of in the post...  Don't know how long this takes to download for some of you...   

[Dinosaur]

This thing sure is sweet once you figure out how to tell it what you want, isn't it.  If a company ever manages to get even 80% of everything figured out with styles and labels created I think there will be some incredible design documents created in a ridiculously short amount of time.

[Cannon]

That's some great looking work, Sinc!

[sinc]

Thanks!

After hacking through things a bit more, I decided I didn't like that hack of moving Point Groups around in order to print.

I finally realized that I can use Point Groups to almost do everything I want.  Basically, I created one Point Group for each layer I wanted points to end up on.  I assigned each point group to the approprate layer, which causes the Points to take on the properties of the Point Group layer.  I can't get points to appear on the same layer in different colors, but I decided that's OK.  The big drawback is that I was forced to create a lot more Point Groups than I wanted.  But it also means I need a lot fewer Point Styles.  Personally, I'd rather use Point Styles, rather than have so many Point Groups, but this way works, and avoids the issue with Point Styles.

But as an added benefit, as I move the cursor around on-screen, points light up in Point Groups.  Before doing this, all of the points would light up, because they were all in the same Point Group.  Win some, lose some...

So now we can control visibility of points using Layers, and the Plot/NoPlot settings on the layers work for everything.  Nice and simple.

I ran into another issue, though.  When selecting Description Keys in order to create Point Groups, there's a problem.  With Desc Key matching in other places, the user can create a key like "CP", and even a line like "CP No. 5 rebar" will match as a CP.  In the Point Group properties, only points that EXACTLY match "CP" will be counted as part of the group.  So if the Description Key is "CP", a point like "CP No. 5 rebar" will not be added to the Point Group.

There are two possible workarounds that I see:

• Add an asterisk to all Desc Keys.  For example, instead of using a Desc Key called "CP", make it "CP*".  This will match descriptions like "CP No. 5 rebar".  Unfortunately, it may have unintended side-effects; for example, if you also had a "CPAN" point code for "Crosspan", you would have a problem, because "CPAN" matches "CP*"...
• Keep the Desc Key as-is, then hand-edit the "Include Points..." list (or in Query Builder) to include another entry.  In the example above, selecting the "CP" point group will add a "CP" entry to the "Include" tab, in the "raw descriptions matching" part.  So add another entry, such as "CP *" (note the space).  This causes lines like "CP No 5 rebar" to be added to the group, but won't match things like "CPAN".  This is probably the better solution.