Terrain boundary option not showing when trying to convert a polyline

[timelliott]

Hi there, I'm a new user looking to make sure our 3D topographical survey will load into Chief before I sign up. I'm having a couple of problems I'm wondering if any users or admins can help with.

 

I have followed the videos for importing a .DWG file.

 

There is no site boundary on the drawing, so I drew one with a polyline and tried to convert it to terrain perimeter but the radio button in the dialog box is greyed out, I couldn't find any article on the knowledge base that would help with this:

 

Firstly, I did get this warning when importing the file, but pressed ignore as this seemed to be the only way that the CAD would import

 

 

Then this is the polyline I drew for the terrain boundary:

 

But when I press the Convert polyline button at the bottom the box doesn't allow me to set it as a perimeter

 

 

Also, when I did the import I selected Contours - Primary (from the DWG file) and mapped to the Terrain, Primary Contours layer, but the actual contour lines from the CAD disappear even though the layer is visible. I'm not sure if this is supposed to happen or not, but it would be helpful to see them.

 

 

Some help would be appreciated as I need to make sure this CAD and terrain mapping etc can be done before I would purchase the product.

 

Many thanks

Tim

[DBCooper]

First, your pictures above are super small which makes it pretty hard to see what is going on.  I am currently working on a laptop remotely and it's already too small for a lot of normal stuff.  So basically I can't tell what the warning message says so I can't offer much advise.

 

Second, there are two common reasons why you might not be able to convert a polyline into a terrain perimeter.  One is that the polyline you selected is not "closed".  The second, which what I think is going on with your plan, is that you already have a terrain perimeter in the plan.  Chief only allows one terrain perimeter at a time.  If some of the other terrain stuff is enabled but not the perimeter, then this almost always means that you already have a perimeter.

 

My guess is that when you went through  the import process that the program automatically built a terrain perimeter to hold the other elevation data you imported (only it's probably not going to be the size/shape you want).  You might be able to get around this by building the perimeter first and then importing the elevation data into it.  You also might be able to import the perimeter directly but this may or may not be easy with the data you are importing.  

 

Importing terrain can sometimes be tricky depending on the data you have.  You could always post the DWG file for someone else to take a look at and give you recommendations on how to import it.

 

There is also a tech article that has some info that might help here:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00719/importing-terrain-elevation-data-from-a-dwg-or-dxf-file.html