Contour line help requested

[Tad_Thurston]

Is there any way to update AECC Contour lines to Civil 3D contour lines? AECC Contour lines may be from LDD I am not sure.

 

Thanks immensely.

[CyberAngel]

As far as I know, there is no way to use AECC contours in Civil 3D in any meaningful way. In other words, AutoCAD is not backward compatible in this respect. To me (and no doubt to many other users) this was a poor decision on Autodesk's part.

 

Anyway. You can explode the AECC contours, get polylines with their proper elevations, and add them to your surface definition. Technically, Civil 3D surfaces don't have contours, they're just a style option.

[Tad_Thurston]

Thanks Cyber, I will look into the explode technique.

 

Tad

[CyberAngel]

Followup question: does anyone know how to adjust label size for legacy contours? Usually I don't need to build a surface, I just show the existing contours. I can open a drawing with AECC_contours and the labels appear normal; then at some point they get so small they can't be seen. Is it the Standard text style height? some system variable like DIMSCALE? What is the deal?

[CyberAngel]

Thanks to some experimenting, I found out that the Standard font height determines the contour label height. Of course, that depends on the original contour labels having a style that includes the Standard font. Changing the Standard height also affects linetypes built with the font; I try to keep it at zero, which explains the vanishing contour labels.

 

Problem (kinda) solved.