I was warned about this, my cad guy said to be careful and I didn't listen.?ÿ
I had a simple easement to write, we have all the field data surveyed and now all I need to do is to create a short easement; description and drawing. I have four drawings to merge to get it done, two from the 1990's, one from 2000 and one from last year. Last year I opened one of the 2000 landdesk?ÿ drawings with C3D 2018 and did a BLA (my first mistake) and I figured I would update the other 2000 drawing the same way since it shows the property the easement is going to terminate on.?ÿ
Big mistake, I open the drawing with C3D 2018 and figured it would be an easy thing to just bring in last year's drawing and make it all fit together. Problem is that the two don't match, different coordinates so I need to move one over to make all fit.?ÿ
Didn't work, can't see the coordinates, nothing will find the old coordinates, I was told not to do it, didn't listen, so I finally give up, delete the whole thing, create a new drawing in C3D with the coordinate template I want, copy/paste in each needed drawing into it and whew it all finally works. They warned me. Tried a short cut and cost myself an hour or more of frustration.?ÿ
I rarely learn from my mistakes unless it causes pain and some sort of trauma, maybe resulting in stitches or severe bruising.
I have one of those sitting on my desk now.
It is possible to put the different projects together and it is not as big a problem as it appears.
First the different coordinate systems must be translated and rotated into the same coordinate system.
Choose one to be the control and rotate the matching boundaries or common lines to match one another and then rotate the linework to match the corrdinates of each project.
Then open the control project and upload the new combined coordinates.
Add the other drawings to that drawing and move and place the line work where it should match.
Yeah, it can be just as easy to do what you accomplished by starting over and making a whole new drawing from scratch.?ÿ
0.02
Two problems with what I did.?ÿ
1. I used C3D to open the older landdesk drawing last year. That worked ok cause I was just adding some text including a description, legend, title, scale, location map, basically text.?ÿ
2. Then this year I should have understood that it wasn't going to work very well when I needed to add points from the older drawings, the 2018 drawing wouldn't see them. When you go to update landdesk points it puts an X at the point, it isn't a node, no point numbers, descriptions, elevations are left. You can't pick the node, all there is a big X.?ÿ
At that point getting the drawings merged was not impossible but it was going to be painful, so I booted and did what I should have done last year and started up a new drawing with a C3D template and it works, just takes a bit of time, maybe an extra 5 minutes. Once I do that I can copy/paste the old drawings in and update points and they are there like they should be. Then of course using the points common in both systems it's simple to move one set of coordinates to the other.?ÿ
Plus now when I label lines and make tables it will all work correctly.?ÿ
The problem is that you are using a CAD system that does not know how to properly use a coordinate system. Instaed it takes a perfectly good set of coordinates and rotates same to somehow make the drawing more usable. I have been using various Carlson CAD prodects for almost 30 years and never had such a problem.
This reminds me of a job interview I had 25 years ago. The engineering company was looking for an engineer to work in LDD. I assured him that I could work in LDD, even knowing how clunky it's coordinate handling was because I had more than 5 years experience using AutoCOGO and SurvCADD. He emphasized that he had other engineers make similar promises but that they could not get productive in LDD. My comment was that probably he should get a better CAD system than different engineers, so I got up and walked out of the interview.
Paul in PA
I will argue all day long that C3D and LDD both need to handle coordinate systems better. I don't spend much time using them for that, I have TBC to take care of projections.?ÿ
My major issue wasn't coordinate systems for this process but changing from LDD to C3D, if I would have taken the proper steps it would have been fine, I tried to short-cut the process. Created a GIGO situation.?ÿ
For Civil 3D, maybe try this. I did, needed a few cracks at it, need to follow the procedure very carefully:
I think from the accent, the presenter is a New Zealander.
He created a new drawing and imported the old drawing, that is the step I left out and I shouldn't have. Of course he is working with canned coordinates which I'm not, TBC handles it well, C3D not so much.
But the issue for me is converting the elements such as point nodes, point numbers, styles, ect. You need to be careful when you up-date a drawing from LDD to C3D. Do it in the correct sequence and it all falls into place, short-cut it and it's a mess.
We have Civil3D but I use Microsurvey and Excel for Congo computations.
I think in Civil 3D one can also roll-your own coordinate systems.
And I'm sure out there somewhere there's a chappie or two, keeping quiet, driving Civil 3D in 8th gear, full survey and coordinate mode, looking like this:
There are point utilities for converting older 'points' into civil3d points. You even have the option to retain the original layers...
