introducing a new surface in a drawing.

[Tinashe]

Guys l am stuck.l have a set of road design drawings issued to contactor for construction,the project is over.now l want to draw as built drawings,ie an additional line on the long section indicating As Built Conditions.l have as built level points in excel format.So how do l bring in the new surface without altering the original?help!!

[lpseifert]

Create a new surface using the as-built data.

[rustysilo]

Or copy and modify the original.

[JerryG]

We typicaly do what Rusty was saying and save to another file using
an acronym such as AB. Then Add the new points
and recreate your surface/tin. Because the drawings are now seperate it will not affect the orginal in any way.

[rustysilo]

I didn't actually mean to create a new file so much as to just copy the surface and rename it within the .dwg, but copying the .dwg is acceptable as well. I think copying the surface and keeping it in the same .dwg would be less intensive on the server.

[BIGAL]

As a ex software dealer I would highly recommend create a "new" combined surface and not erase the existing surface model then rextract to show the changes. You could erase the interim surface if you have space issues. Ie only have 2 surfaces exist and asbuilt.

[Tinashe]

thank you all for the help.now how do l go about this new new combined surface

[rustysilo]

I would suppose a good place to start is to copy the original design surface, rename it to asbuilt and then import the new points adding them to a new point group called "asbuilt". Review these new points in relation to the design surface and decide whether you will be able to simply modify data that is already a part of the design surface (this is where I stick my foot in my mouth from earlier advice realizing that if you modify this data then your original design surface will also change and say "you may actually have to create a separate .dwg file") or if you are better off starting a fresh surface from scratch using the new asbuilt survey data.

[BIGAL]

Depending on your new asbuilt data you may have to use a couple of different ways to create the new surface.

If you have just random new points then you would add these to the asbuilt model but you must now exclude say the matching old level point otherwise the same spot will have two levels ! You can do this in the edits of the point groups.

If you have large areas relevelled then create a model of each area you can simply paste the new model into the old model, pick "asbuilt" then "edits" under "definition".

A word of warning your new points need to blend well into the old model ie no long triangles otherwise it will erase points you want to keep, you may need to setup boundaries to clip the new models.