Fixing Imported Survey Figures in Civil 3D: How to Correct Tangent and Curve Errors

So, in this video, we're going to go ahead and edit some of the figures that were imported during our survey import event. What may be a little confusing is that when you look at these figures, you may notice during an import event, or specifically during this import event, that some of the figures didn't draw in quite right.

So, specifically what I'm talking about is this corner over here. We're going to navigate closer by zooming in, and what you'll see happened is that most of the corners on this roadway were drawn correctly with a tangent, a curve, and a tangent. But in this instance here, we have a tangent, and then the curve is actually drawn in the opposite direction from what we intended, and then continues on.

This could happen from a miscode from a surveyor, or it could be a Civil 3D anomaly. Whatever reason it is, this is completely fixable, so we're going to go ahead and do that now. What you're going to do is you're going to select the figure, and then once you've selected the figure, the contextual ribbon bar should pop up.

If you have any issues with a drawing of one of the figures from your survey, the first place you want to check is your survey figure properties. So, I'm going to go ahead and select survey figure properties, and what Civil 3D does then is it shows me the entire survey figure, how it was drawn in, and what codes are being used. Basically, it's drawing a line, then a curve, another line, another curve, and finally another line.

So, what we have going on here is that this curve is drawn incorrectly. The quickest fix for a curve that draws incorrectly is to try and swap the direction, the draw direction. So, maybe the code worked better being drawn from this point going this direction and around this curve and up and around this curve and back.

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And so, we're going to go ahead and choose to reverse the direction of the figure. So, when we do this, it gives you a preview of what that change is going to look like. We start here, we draw this line, we now have a curve that comes in the correct way that we want it.

It draws straight through, it comes around, and it draws another tangent section. So, I'm going to go ahead and click apply so that I apply that change to my figure and click okay. And so, what we now have is a correctly drawn figure.

So, what we're going to go do next is we're going to look at this survey figure properties just to see what the rest of the information is in here. So, we have the name of the survey figure, a description, and an indication if it’s a break line.

If for some reason we didn't want it to be a break line and we accidentally told it to be a survey import, you can deselect that here. You have your lot line, you have the layer that it's being drawn on, you have the style it uses. So, you can change the style, you can change the site that it's located in, you can tell whether or not it's closed, and then it tells you information about this figure as well.

It tells you how many vertices, what the length is, what the area is, if it's part of a network, what import event it was part of, and whether or not you are going to generate this. So, you

Also have the number of the vertices, the description of those vertices, you have what type of geometry it is, or actually what type of geometry the figure is, and then you have information on northing, easting, and elevation. So, you can modify some of these if it wasn't drawn correctly.

So, if you know for a fact that this was supposed to be a line and it drew in as a curve, then you can change it to a point or use a curve break. That's another option for if the circle or the curve didn't draw in correctly; you can change the type of curve it is to hopefully get it to be the correct orientation. It just so happened that our reversing of the direction was the best option for us in this, but you can play around with the geometry to get your figures to display in the manner that you want them to display properly inside of Civil 3D.

So, I'm going to go ahead and click okay, and what we have going on in here also is that when we created our figure prefix database, we specified that these lines and these figures were going to be on specific layers. Now, these layers aren't showing up in here, and that is because when we created the figure prefix database, we selected a style that prevented those layers from displaying correctly. If I look at standard and I select standard, you'll see that there's another option for basic.

Basic is one that would actually allow the lines to come through. The way you can tell this is if I clicked in my settings tab and navigate to survey, figures, figure styles, I have basic and standard here. If I right-click on standard and click edit, you'll see that under display, my figure lines are going to be drawn in on layer zero and the color will be white, which is what we're seeing right now. If I went to basic and I right-click and select edit in display, what you're going to see is figure lines are going to draw in on a layer of zero and they're going to be by layer.

Zero allows whatever the feature line code is to come through rather than being a specific layer, and so by layer will allow the correct color to show through. So I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. We're going to update our figure prefix database by clicking on survey tab, civil 201, right click, manage figure prefix database.

So, I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. What we're going to do is we're going to update our figure prefix database by clicking on the Survey tab, selecting Civil 201, right-clicking, and choosing Manage Figure Prefix Database.

I'm going to go in and change each of these to Basic so that the next time we perform an import, it's not the wrong selection. So I'm just selecting from the drop-down menu, choosing Basic. I'm walking through each of these, and this is why you should be careful when creating your figure prefix databases—make sure your baseline is correctly set up so that you don't have to make changes like this later on.

So I'm going to go ahead and click okay. Now we could go ahead and click on this survey import, right-click, and perform a re-import, but I don't want to redefine all the numbers again. So what I'm going to do instead is select all of my figures, then select Similar.

I'm missing a few figures here, including my top and toe. What I'm going to do is select Properties, and if I look at the style right here under Properties, I can drop down and click Basic. Now what I've done is I've updated all of these to the Basic style, and they're coming through on the specific layers they're supposed to be on. It looks like I missed one or two, so I'm going to go back to Properties. I'm going to go into style.

I'm going to select Basic. I'm going to close this, and we're going to zoom back out. I'm going to see if I have any others that are missing.

Nope, they're all drawn in. Oh, I do have two more right here, so I'm going to right-click, select Properties, drop down, select Basic, and close. I'm going to double-click my center scroll wheel to zoom extents, or I can use the zoom extents command. What we see here now is that because we allowed those layers to display correctly rather than forcing them to white, we now have a clear and useful topo that shows distinct layer colors and feature lines drawn with the specific line styles and colors we intended for our use inside our drawing.

So I'm going to go ahead and click Save, and in the next video we're going to draw what would have been a parcel based on some found information, but as a polyline, and we're going to run the Traverse Editor command.