User-Defined Contours

Designs in the real-world seem to not always and easily fall into nice round-even foot or meter increments.  With legacy software, one would change the contour intervals, import certain ranges, delete contours or a polyline to achieve the desired result.  That’s a lot of work.

Join me after the jump for a quick discussion.

What is a user-defined contour? What purpose does it have? 

In your surface style -> display tab, you have the ability to turn on User Contours.  Change your settings as you see fit.

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Great.  Wonderful.  But, I want to display by Base Flood Elevation contour – how do I define it?  In my case, the HWL is 598.5. 

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We know the Surface Style controls the Major and Minor intervals.  The Surface Style does not appear to control what a user-defined contour’s definition is.  It only controls the display.

The Surface Properties –> Analysis Tab –> Analysis Type –> User-defined contours will control what contour lines you want to display in plan.  (Yes – you can specify multiple User-Defined Contour lines to display say a 2-year, 10-year, and 100-year elevation) 

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One comment

  1. Very useful for basin/pond berm elevations that are sometimes at an intermidiate elevation and that also need to be shown on plan view.