site model

[shasta]

A client (an Architect) recently sent me an AutoCad file with topos and the proposed house footprint. The survey he got seemed to not match realities on the site so he shot a radial series of elevations from a central stake located on a corner of the house footprint. All elevations were relative to the height of the stake. I wanted to create some new topos based on these measures, but I can't figure out how to get these measures (looks like 8 spokes of a wheel with numbers along the lines) into one of the supported site modeling forms of VWL. I thought about using a very fine grid, but when I tried to start inputing them, the red grid points obscured my radial data on the screen. Any ideas?

[Marc Pitman]

You could place 3-D loci at the end of each line and then assign the elevation to each loci using the object info palette. Then use the 3-D loci in creating the DTM.

[shasta]

Thanks! That seemed to do the trick. Now I'm trying to export to AutoCad. Keep your fingers crossed!

[Raffer]

Importing and exporting to AUTOCAD is difficult because autocad turns classes into layers and vice versa when importing AUTOCAD. Additionally, spot elevations using a symbol linked to a resource is not allowed when exporting to AUTOCAD because it always reads the default elevation of the symbol. Also many things in AUTOCAD are blocks which are the same a symbols but many users make large blocks in AUTOCAD because it is more difficult to do the simple tasks. These blocks are sometimes imported to VectorWorks as symbols but more likely as layers. So be careful. You can set "spidered" field information in your documents by establishing the location point and backsight point then changing a line according to the angle, distance information, making sure you reshape the line at the location point end. Then put either a 2-D loci or 3-D loci at that point on the end of the line.