Magic wand settings ignored when space clicking polylines

[Paul King]

It seems that when editing a mesh to add a contour, that with the mesh selected, space clicking a surveyor's 2D polyline contour results in the same number of nodes being added to the mesh as are in the polyline, no matter what magic wand settings are used.

How do I overcome this and get magic wand settings to actually apply as they intuitively should?

I need the number of nodes along each contour to be significantly reduced from the number in the supplied contour lines, in order to reduce the number of resulting polygons in the mesh (this is for a very large site mesh)

There are hundreds of contour lines crossing this site, and each contour is something like a kilometre long, and so attempting to manually trace over each one of the surveyor's contours with a new polyline with fewer points is not a sensible option.

There is no 3D data from the surveyor available in any format (no 3D DWG, no txt or xtz files etc) - so the old space clicking contours method seems to be my only option (even then it will be quite laborious assigning heights to each contour)

The surveyor is also unable to supply simplified 2D contours 

What is the best method for dealing with this situation?

[Eduardo Rolon]

This might not be what you want to hear but I usually draw polylines over the surveyors' to simplify regardless of project size.

[Paul King]

Correct - Not what i want to hear!

Sadly, manually redrawing contours is what I often end up doing too - but after 37 years of being in the business of creating terrain models, ArchiCAD must have a better way!?

[Eduardo Rolon]

Sadly don't think so.

Mesh tool has not been updated for the last 20+ years.

Same with the Magic Wand.

-----

Have you tried LAND4?

https://www.land4cad.com/

[DGSketcher]

See if this thread helps. The comments of @Richard Morrison solved my problem in a similar situation.

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Collaboration-with-other/Importing-Topographical-data/td-p/21913...

[Yves]

Hi,

I've been faced with this problem before without really finding a solution...
After reflection and testing this morning I can offer you an alternative but not perfect!
From a polyline accessory object that I had made to indicate the lengths of polylines.

As you could see in the video after placing the object and setting the step you will have to decompose it, delete the excess lines, unify and adapt the new polylines

Hoping that one day Graphisoft will give us a more efficient solution

https://youtu.be/aLo535xhi1M

[Paul King]

That is an interesting looking tool - well done!

I will play around with it and see how I get on.  I imagine it could have a range of potential applications.

I wonder if a variation on this tool could allow user to select multiple polylines and simplify them all at once?

The other option mentioned by @DGSketcher above seems to be to space click the polylines one by one to create splines, then space click the splines to create new polylines with fewer nodes (with curves to work from, this time the magic wand settings will be respected).