I spent most of last week in the training room of George Butler Associates, Inc. in Lenexa, Kansas.   I was there helping the survey department learn all about Civil 3D, and developing workflows to utilize the Survey Database in Civil 3D to make their jobs perhaps a bit easier.   I had a great time with Terry, Andrew, and most of all, John Postlewait.   As most companies tend to do, the survey department was hidden down in the basement, so I felt right at home, especially when John served us all his absolutely freakin’ incredible homemade chili.   A very heartfelt thanks to John and crew for showing me some real hospitality.

Now, one of the things that we discussed that I’ve heard before is about stakeout points – those points that are calculated in the office to be uploaded to the data collector and staked out into the field.   How do they fit in with the survey database?   There’s no inherent functionality to get those points into the survey database – or is there?  Follow the link to see how I came to figure out a way to do just that…

Some of you may have seen the original post that I wrote about this on Saturday, January 20th.   Sometimes, very obvious things can slide by unnoticed by people who spend what can seem like every waking hour with this software.   A very observant reader, Tim Stalin, pointed out in a comment that the workaround that I had discovered was, in fact, entirely unnecessary.   My original post had us exporting out calculated points, converting the text file to a FBK using TDS Survey Link, and then importing the resulting FBK into the existing survey database, where they would be displayed as Non-Control points.    Tim pointed out that simply right-clicking on Non-Control points in the network would allow you to add points from a drawing to the survey database.   Further review of this allows us to add points in many different ways, including by point number range, by group, drawing selection, etc.    This is definitely a much better way of adding stakeout points to a survey database, and my thanks go out to Tim again for pointing it out.

Yet another discovery I made during this process – come to find out, crow doesn’t taste all that bad.  😉