Contour labels disappear and surface issues.

[shoehne]

I am working on a stream restoration project. Recently we upgraded from land desktop to Autocad Civil 3D 2009. Lets say it has been a learning curve. In LDD I created my surface using breaklines for the channel and then merging them with the existing surface by clipping the existing contours along a boundary. However this method doesn't work as well in Civil 3D, I can't get the grading that I would like. It is easier to grade outside the channel by hand. So, I have created the channel using breaklines, and done the grading outside the channel by drawing in the contours as polylines and importing them into my surface. However then I am left with 4 layers, two for the drawn contours (major and Min) and two for the ones generated by Civil3D. Is there a way to only have one contour layer?

Other issues:

1) My Civil3D contours won't show up sometimes without the drawn contour layers turned on.

2)My contour labels disappear for some of my surfaces. This doesn't happen to all of them, even though they are created exactly the same way. Why? I have the surface layer on, the labels are on a separate label layer and the contour line is turned off. They only show up with the drawn contour layers turned on. I don't want this layer on.

3) Sometimes my Civil3D contours will close themselves off and make a plateau feature. Is there an easy way to get rid of this?

4) If there is a better way to do my surfaces please let me know. And if anyone has an idea of more tutorials on surface creation than is what supplied in the Autodesk package. . .please let me know.

Thanks. . .

[rustysilo]

My suggestion would be to create three surfaces, 1 eg surface, 1 proposed surface, and 1 composite surface. Of course you'll start out with the eg surface that has all existing topo and features. Then you will create the proposed surface which will be your stream restoration. You can create this using a corridor, feature lines (breaklines), and gradings, or a combination of the three. After this surface is complete you can create the composite which will essentially be a copy of the existing (eg) surface with the proposed pasted into it. If you need guidance with this just let us know. Feel free to pm or email me as well.

1) My Civil3D contours won't show up sometimes without the drawn contour layers turned on.

The Civil 3d contours are controlled in the surface style as well as with the normal layer manager. If the layer in your surface style is set to the same as your manually drawn contours then the Civil 3d contours will turn off if the drawn contour layers are off.

2)My contour labels disappear for some of my surfaces. This doesn't happen to all of them, even though they are created exactly the same way. Why? I have the surface layer on, the labels are on a separate label layer and the contour line is turned off. They only show up with the drawn contour layers turned on. I don't want this layer on.

This can be fixed by not using "drawn contours" and creating surface data that will produce the desired results. This would be best in any circumstance in the first place. Generally you want the contours to be a result of your surface data rather than the other way around.

3) Sometimes my Civil3D contours will close themselves off and make a plateau feature. Is there an easy way to get rid of this?

This is difficult to determine without seeing it. Maybe post a screen grab. My first impression is that you may need to swap some edges.

4) If there is a better way to do my surfaces please let me know. And if anyone has an idea of more tutorials on surface creation than is what supplied in the Autodesk package. . .please let me know.

Broadly, for existing surfaces you will use a combination of points and breakline data to create the surface. For proposed surfaces folks will use corridors, feature lines (aka - breaklines), and grading tools and points would be used sparingly.
Prime Services has some good tutorials, but the video's are large in size. You can download them and save them for later viewing.
Here are some online tech tips from Avatech.
Follow the link in my signature for some other tips compiled from various posts.

That should be enough to whet your whistle for now.