The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show

Dan Philbrick and Dave Simeone add their colorful and insightful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Civil 3D and the civil engineering marketplace.

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posted 06/21/07 by Daniel Philbrick Civil 3D and Borehole Data - Part II
I missed completing the Part II of my borehole data post during both the Stanley Cup playoffs and the NBA playoffs. At least I completed it before the World Series.

For review a quick review of Part 1, there are two ways to model borehole data in Civil 3D. The first method is done through User Defined Property Fields and I covered that in Part 1 of this series. The second way of handling borehole data is via an External Point Database. This is the method which I will discuss today. In this method, you override the point elevation based on the values in an external database. To demonstrate this, I have first created an Access database with fields for PNO (Point Number), BH_1 (Borehole Elevation 1), and BH_2 (Borehole Elevation 2).

AccessDb.png

In this example, we have a database which has 2 elevation values for each point number. Next we are going to override the elevations by creating an External Data Reference which will point to a field in the Access database. The External Data References are created by going to the setting manager, right clicking on the External Data References node, and selection New. The following dialog will appear.

CreatingExternalDataReference.png

On this dialog, you need to select the external database, and then map the fields in the database to the External Data Reference to be used for the elevations in the drawing. In the previous dialog you can see that I mapped the Point Number (PNO) and the Borehole Elevation value (BH_2 in this example).

Now you need to override the elevations of the points with the elevations defined in the External database. This is done by creating a point group and selecting the “Overrides Tab” . For the elevations, you want to override the elevation and select one of the external data references you created. The following dialog shows the Point Group override for the BH_2 external data reference.

ExternalDataReferencePointGroup.png

That completes the steps. Now you have a point group where the elevations are being overridden and they are being established from the value in an external database. The key difference between this method and the User Defined Properties is that the External Data Reference data is external to the drawing. When you use User Defined Properties, you need to import the data into the drawing and populate the Property fields.

Using either method, you now can create a surface based on the overridden elevations. Therefore, you can have one point number that has an arbitrary number of elevations assigned to that point. The last step is the create a surface based on the appropriated point group which represents the borehole strata of interest.

Dan

2 comments In The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > Points

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  • Borehole data and Civil 3D....

    Posted 06/02/07 by Daniel Philbrick

    I am a hockey fan and the only word I can come up with for this Stanley Cup series is “Boring”. I’d love to see Ottawa win (or at least be competitive), but it has not been the most exciting series. Speaking of “Boring”, there have been a few recent inquires about how to handle Borehole data in Civil 3D. I thought I’d take a break from this hockey game and write about Borehole data.

    There are 2 ways setup borehole data in Civil 3D – User Defined Properties and External Data References. Both methods allow you to have more than one elevation per point object. The first method I’ll discuss is via User-Defined Properties. To use this method, you first need to create a User-Defined Property Classification and then create the User-Defined Properties in that classification. The following dialog shows the creation of a user-defined property for a borehole elevation.

    UserDefinedProperty.PNG

    Now that you have User-Defined Properties representing Borehole data, the next step is to import data into those fields. We’ll do this by importing from a TXT file with a format of Point Number, BoreHole Elevation 1, BoreHole Elevation 2 (tab delimited). A snippet of this file looks like the following:

    BoreHoleDataTXTFile.PNG

    Next you need to create a custom Point File Format which will import the data into the User-Defined Properties. You do this by going to the settings tree and creating a Point File Format. The following dialog shows this dialog with the Properties of Point Number, BH_1 and BH_2 for the properties.

    BoreHolePointFileFormat.PNG


    The last step is to Load the data in from the TXT file. Go to the menu and select Points->Import/Export Points->Import Points. Importing the Point file (with the format created above) will populate the User-defined Property fields with the Elevations defined in the TXT file.

    The hard work is now done. The last step is to create a Point Group and define the elevations based on the Borehole data. The key part of this is to create the point group and assign an elevation override on the “Overrides” tab of the Point Group Properties. This is shown in the following dialog.

    BoreHole1PointGroup.PNG

    Now that we have a Point Group a surface can easily be created. In the next post, I go through the process of modeling Borehole data using External Data references.

    Back to the hockey game – Ottawa is up 4-3, this series is not so boring anymore!

    Dan

    1 commentsIn The Dave and Dan Civil 3D Show > Points