ArchiCAD and Civil 3D

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I'm a draftsman at a surveying company working with Autodesk Civil 3D, and we have a handful of clients using ArchiCAD. I'm working with one at the moment to get our 3D surface from Civil into ArchiCAD.

We've tried exporting the points to an .xyz file, but the only problem is that when that gets bought into ArchiCAD there are no breaklines like there would be in Civil 3D. Is there anyway to bring in the 3D faces from Civil, or to bring in the breaklines from Civil 3D?

[Nader Belal]

@Paul King

In that case, there is a little cheat I used to do,

Take 2 points with a distance difference of 0.1 mm from one another, but one with the lower altitude, and the other higher altitude . . . it may be not 100% accurate, but it works nicely

[Paul King]

Moonlight wrote:
@Paul King

In that case, there is a little cheat I used to do,

Take 2 points with a distance difference of 0.1 mm from one another, but one with the lower altitude, and the other higher altitude . . . it may be not 100% accurate, but it works nicely

Hi Moonlight

Yes this is one of the workarounds, but it involves doing this on either side of the breakline for hundreds of polygon edges that pass across the break line - and for each instance you need to know the ground level above and below (this is far from easy on an undulating sloping stepped site, when nearest hard data points might be a meter away above and below breakline location you are trying to manually recreate.

You end up having to eyeball it, and so loose any claim to accuracy, as well as wasting many hours in the process.

That a workaround is needed at all is the unacceptable aspect for a 21st Century terrain modelling tool.

[Nader Belal]

@Paul King

Can you send me the file as a 3D AutoCAD file, and mark me one break line as an example ?

I may be able to make it work, in less than 5 minutes*.

*I understand that you will need to make it work for unlimited number of break points, and the 5 minutes was an estimation for worst case scenario

[Paul King]

Thank you very much - that is a kind offer. The original project concerned however I dealt with a while ago, in a slow and painful way (this thread is fairly old now).
But I do think the need strongly remains for ArchiCAD to recognize break lines.
However if you have a fast workaround, that would be valuable to share.
I can dig up the original file as an example if you maybe feel like making a video or similar?

[Nader Belal]

That's why I was asking for the file

It does't have to be that file, may be any terrain with a break line.

[Paul King]

Cheers - I just sent you example via PM