AutoCAD DWG to Terrain

[Joe_Carrick]

I am working on a fairly large piece of property.  I have a DWG that contains all the contours but when imported to Chief they are only splines without the elevation data.  In addition, these splines are not continuous across the site (disconnected at text indicating the elevations).

 

Does anyone know an easy way to convert this to terrain elevation data other than manually selecting each spline segment and converting them to elevation lines? 

[mattyt12]

I use draftsight which has a free version, its works much the same as qutocad including commands. Its a quicker way to do a little tidy up of the dwg like join polylines if they are broken and nominate Z-Values for contours if it hasn't been done.

[johnny]

I've run into this problem many times - i used to just end up blocking the topo and drawing Chief elevation splines over it (tracing).  However, Glenn showed me how much better Chief handles elevation regions, so now I just use those to get pretty close to what the topo reads (close enough). 

 

You can actually just fill in (poly) the area between topo lines every so often and use that as the terrain region.  Works well actually.

[rlackore]

I can't imagine a large survey, probably done in AutoCAD Civil3D, not having Z-values assigned to the topo lines. Then you can use the Import Drawing Assistant to convert the lines on the relevant layers to Elevation Data:

 

It's been my experience that when importing very large terrains that the small breaks in the elevation lines from the text has very little affect on Chief's terrain generation, though that's not to say that there isn't some cleanup necessary.

 

If you upload the dwg I can check it for Z-values.

[Joe_Carrick]

Thanks Robert,

I will take a look and verify if the elevation data exists.  That's probably all I need.