In part 1 of this topic you were instructed on how to utilize Civil 3D feature lines in combination with a Pipe Network to generate COGO points to be exported for staking. It was a detailed tutorial and the application of this process can be used for many other scenarios aside from pipes and structures. In this post, however, we will explore an alternative that may have more appeal, although that will be subjective to each user.
Start With a Pipe Network
If you haven't already, create your pipe network, position the horizontal structure locations in plan view, and adjust the invert and sump elevations in profile view. With that taken care of, we are ready to move onto this exercise.
It's a Copy and Paste World
Select your pipe network from the drawing and select "Edit Pipe Network" from the contextual ribbon tab. On the Pipe Network Layout toolbar, open the "Pipe Network Vistas" option.
This will bring up the Pipes and Structures tabs of the Panorama. Highlight all rows of information from the Structures tab, right-click, and select "Copy to clipboard" from the shortcut menu.
Paste this information into Microsoft Excel (or some other spreadsheet software capable of export to a .CSV or ASCII .TXT format). Do the same thing for the information on the Pipes tab.
Cleanup the spreadsheet to remove all extraneous columns of information so that only the northing, easting, and elevations are left. This could include the rim elevations of the structures, sump elevations, pipe invert elevations, or all of the above (if you copy the structure coordinates accordingly to accommodate multiple elevations at each structure). With the spreadsheet formatted properly, perform a Save As and choose "CSV (Comma delimited)" from the Save as type drop-down. Save the file within your project directory with an appropriate name and pick "OK."
Navigate to the file and open in with Notepad to review the results and check for accuracy. It should look like a standard NEZ point file, but can easily be augmented with point numbers and descriptions to format it as a PNEZD point file.
Well, what do you think? Any easier than the exercise from last week? Let us know in the comments section below and make suggestions on other topics you'd like us to post about.
As an additional option to what I've discussed in this 2-part series, and if you are comfortable with editing code, check out Christopher Fugitt's post on Using Pipe Sample VBA end up with similar results.
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