topic Re: XYZ File Not Importing in Collaboration with other software

XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:50:09 GMT

All-
I am new to your forum and hoping somebody can help me out. I have provided the attached xyz file of a survey I did for one of my Archicad clients. They are trying to use the new Import Surveyors Data tool in ArchiCad 14 but it is not working. Can somebody try this on their machine and if you can make it work will you please tell me how you did it? and also can you please send me the mesh? The XYZ file is in international feet.

thanks
Thomas Gnauck

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:50:22 GMT

Where is the attached xyz file ??

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Erika Epstein — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:14:57 GMT

Where is Work?

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:17:44 GMT

Here is the file iI changed the extension to PDF to pass the filter the file is actually a txt file if you change the extension- The work is in Montana USA

thanks
t.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Greg A_ Blunier — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:06:33 GMT

I think you need to clean up the text file.
It wouldn't import for me, so I looked at it in a text editor and found:
1. It had 4251 points, many of which were duplicates. After sorting and deleting the duplicates, there were only 758 points.
2. The coordinate values were huge. They were over 300 miles from the origin. I would recommend "offsetting" the values before importing so that they are closer to the origin.
Greg

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:51:49 GMT

Sorry gnauck,

All my tryes with your file FAILED.....AC14 STOP's RESPONDING. Even if I use only 20 points.
Try to make Mesh from myone attached file.

Send your file to Graphisoft.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Erika Epstein — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:41:33 GMT

gnauk,
The file you posted is problematic. When I compared it with the a civil txt file I have that works, there is a fourth column filled with
Soft 1
Soft 4
Soft 3

etc.

HTH

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:30:49 GMT

andro55 wrote:
Sorry gnauck,

All my tryes with your file FAILED.....AC14 STOP's RESPONDING. Even if I use only 20 points.
Try to make Mesh from myone attached file.

Send your file to Graphisoft.

Howdy all,

I'm on the AC end working with gnauck on this. Thanks for all the input thus far.

andro55, I had no problems converting the file you uploaded. Oddly enough, I WAS able to convert approx. 1/4 of gnauck's file (by manually deleting the latter 3/4's of it in the .txt file before converting in AC14) but I just tried to do it again, and even that didn't work.(!!??) With that said, I sent the file to Karl O. to see if a faster processor would do the trick. He couldn't convert it either. Noting that the coordinates are large numbers, Karl took another approach (quoted below):

"AC 14 basically froze up on me with your data file. I had a feeling that the coordinate values were too big for what AC could deal with - it cannot cope with coordinates that are really far from the origin. So, I did a replace all to get rid of the "171" prefix on every line, making whatever that value is smaller. It then converted instantly. I don't know if doing that alters things in a bad way - you'll have to check."

It's looking like this might be a "too far from origin" problem, though I'm also curious as to gnauck's response to Greg's point #1 regarding the duplicate points.

Will be sending this to GS tech support to get their take on it....

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Greg A_ Blunier — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:53:46 GMT

After cleaning out the duplicate points, I was able to get it to import. If you want me to send the .pln, send me a private message with contact details.
Greg

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Karl Ottenstein — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:13:26 GMT

Greg wrote:
After cleaning out the duplicate points, I was able to get it to import. If you want me to send the .pln, send me a private message with contact details.
Greg

Found the same thing, Greg.

Here's how I eliminated the duplicates on the Mac:
Open a Terminal window into the folder where the xyz file resides.
Enter the command:
cat nobelxyz.txt | sort | uniq > nobelxyz_clean.txt

then use the nobelxyz_clean.txt file.

It seems fishy that reducing the x coord value also allowed generation of a mesh, even with duplicates. And, the freeze-thing shows that GS needs to check the validity of the input file better and gracefully produce a message. So, this should still get sent to tech support.

Attached is the no-duplicates file.

Cheers,
Karl

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 21:45:49 GMT

Wow fellas, can't thank you enough for that fix. I'm afraid I still need to expand my abilities when it comes to running commands in Terminal though. Nevertheless, it definitely looks like this has done the trick. After converting the "clean" file into a mesh, I overlaid an xref of the 2d contours and triangulation points (.dwg). Between the mesh and .dwg everything appears to match up perfectly. Bummer that AC can't handle the duplicated points. I sent an email to tech support as a heads up on the problem. Maybe a good opportunity for a future fix?

Many thanks for the expertise!

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:42:39 GMT

Tripp wrote:
After converting the "clean" file into a mesh, I overlaid an xref of the 2d contours and triangulation points (.dwg). Between the mesh and .dwg everything appears to match up perfectly.!

Ok, well maybe not "perfectly," but close. After working with gnauck a bit more on this, he was able to supply a "raw" version of the xyz file - which was effectively a cleaned up version (read: all duplicate points were eliminated) of the txt file. It converted into a mesh seamlessly. When overlaid on the mesh derived from Karl's "cleaned" txt file, there were some minor differences in triangulation as viewed in plan, which therefore leads me to assume there were minor differences in the mesh at the edges.

Hoping that gnauck will make a final post to help AC users communicate effectively w/ surveyor's to obtain a usable xyz file.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:20:10 GMT

All-
Thanks for your help on this. Here is what happened (from the surveying standpoint) the original xyz file was a tin (triangulated irregular network) containing an x,y, & z for each triangle point - this is ideal for civil software because it takes into account breaklines, void areas, etc. but it results in numerous duplicate points for each triangle vertices. Still not sure if it was the sheer amount of points or the duplicates that caused the Archicad crash but the workaround was to use the raw xyz data from the survey without breaklines or voids. This approach reduced the point count to roughly 700 instead of several thousand.

thanks again
t.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Erika Epstein — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:06:13 GMT

t.
When you talk to your civil person, can you explain the problem and ask what you should be asking for, and then post back?

You are not the only ones who will run into this.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:09:59 GMT

gnauck wrote:
use the raw xyz data from the survey without breaklines or voids

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

David Maudlin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:40:24 GMT

Tripp wrote:
When overlaid on the mesh derived from Karl's "cleaned" txt file, there were some minor differences in triangulation as viewed in plan, which therefore leads me to assume there were minor differences in the mesh at the edges.

Not necessarily, two identical meshes can result in two different triangulation results, see this thread:
Mesh volume calculation accuracy?

David

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:38:50 GMT

Hi I am new Archicad user. Could anyone help me with editing Surveyor Data with new Import Surveyors Data tool? It edits data if there are just the tree colums x y z. Is there a way i can also put the name of each point automaticaly? If the first colum is the name of the point it does not insert anything. Thank you.

Re: XYZ File Not Importing

Nando Mogollon — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:07:07 GMT

Hi All
It's a bit late for this comment but any way..... just for the record:

The number of points doesn't really affect the speed or the creation of the mesh I have done it with more than 15.000 points and still works.
Nevertheless I have found that txt files are more reliable than xyz files... I have not found the cause of this yet.

Regards

Nando