Want to Graphically Move Your Survey Database Points?

One of the major complaints I hear about the Civil 3D survey database is the lack of EASY functionality to move your points. This really goes against the whole concept of the survey database, but oftentimes the office crew wants to just manually “tweak” a point rather than sending a very expensive field crew out into the field. Well, in Civil 3D 2008, you can do this. I’ll tell you how after the jump.

As you know, when you select a survey database point in a drawing, you get no grip as you do with a COGO point on the point marker. This is because the point is locked by the survey database. Previously, to be able to modify (move) those points, you had to go into the survey network and edit/adjust the fieldbook file. Here’s what points looked like when locked by the survey database:

Note the lack of grip on the point marker.

Under your survey database, however, you can go into survey points, right click, click on points, and click on Unlock in Drawing.

Now, let’s look at that point again:

Note the grip on the point marker – you can now do any edit on this point that you could with any other COGO point object – as a matter of fact, that’s what it is now!

However, I’d be very irresponsible if I didn’t mention the following:

THIS IS A ONE-WAY TRANSACTION. ONCE YOU UNLOCK THE SURVEY DATABASE POINTS IN THE CURRENT DRAWING, THEY LOSE THEIR DYNAMIC LINK TO THE DATABASE. ANY EDITS TO THE DATABASE WILL NO LONGER BE REFLECTED IN THE DRAWING. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, WE’RE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BLAH BLAH BLAH…. (seriously, make sure you know that you break the survey database link before you do this.)

4 comments

  1. mike shick says:

    Maybe I misunderstand. But you can move and rotate points without the grip. However, the task is extremely cumbersome…and it is not a quick and smooth function like in LDT.

  2. Glenn Griswold says:

    To answer Mike, this makes it so that you can easily modify the points, rather than editting the field-book file and having to re-import it every time you need to fix something like a rod height. Its a matter of time and production, really. It was something that had us surveyors tearing their hair out about Civil3d 07.

    Now, can this let you edit the descriptions easily too?

  3. John M. says:

    Hip Hip Hoo….cr_p! (I can post this one to James’ post on Saving Panorama Views too. 😉 It works on everything but pipes 😮 )

    Hmm, sounds like your still better off just modifing the FBK file if you want to maintain a DB.

    Is this really going to help?

    J. Mayo

  4. Jeremy Roberts says:

    Is there a way to translate and rotate a whole survey database without unlocking the points and exploding the figure into 3D polylines?