2d topo survey to 3d

Aug 19, 2007 5 Replies

Hi, I've got a 2D topographic land survey that I want to use in Civil



3D. The problem is that there are no Z coordinates on the drawing entities - the levels are just written as TEXT entities all over the drawing. I thought of getting a script written that could convert each text onto a POINT entity, but unfortunately each piece of text is not at the exact point that it refers to - there is a cross somewhere near each text which represents the place where the level should be. Does anyone know if it is possible to convert this type of 2D topo survey into an accurate 3D DXF/DWG?

Thanks, JF.


HiHo; Yes but it will be lot's of work depending on the amount of data your talking about. Use this routine to extract a number from the text string, then insert a Point at the "X" and finally print the extracted number to the Elevation attribute. This could be done with a lisp program that finds all "X's" , replaces them with a Point Block and stops for you to pick the approiate elevation. Hope this helps...........

(defun is_numeric (c)

(or (= c ".") (wcmatch c "*[0-9]*")) )

(defun extract_number (s)

(setq exit_flag nil) (setq i 1) (setq first_digit nil)

(while (and (not exit_flag) (setq c (substr s i 1)))

(if (not first_digit) ; we haven't hit the first digit (progn (if (is_numeric c)

(progn (setq num_string c) (setq first_digit T) ) )

); progn

; we're already doing numbers

(if (is_numeric c)

(setq num_string (strcat num_string c)) (setq exit_flag T)

) )

(setq i (1+ i)) ) ; while

(atof num_string)

)

From what I've heard, yes. In surveying, as in most things, you get what you pay for...

Joe, there's a software app called Topogx which does what you're looking for. You can get it at

formatting link
Worked great for me on converting some old 2D surveys.

HiHo; My, solution in the past, was to contact the Survey firm and ask for the "XYZ Descriptor" file.

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