I have not used Z-lines much in a fence, but currently have some topo data that is not a surface, and which I need to plot. This is for a river crossing, where I have the surface for the land on either side, and some soundings in the river. I was thinking that I could create an alignment across the river, and plot the river bottom using the soundings at various stations as z-lines, scaled from a print of the plan. The issue I have is that I need the coordinates for each z-line point, and a simple straight alignment only has the coordinates for the end points. Is there a way to easily list or create the points for the stations, at say a 25-foot interval? Or do I need to create the alignment using multiple 25-foot long segments, which does not seem that easy to do using the gint drawing tools.
Do you use any advanced CAD software (e.g. OpenRoads, InRoads, Civil 3D), or gINT only?
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We use Civil 3D. We could draw the baseline in there, and export to gINT (or create a surface of the data), but I was trying to determine if there is an easy way to do this without going to cadd. Not all of our engineers are cadd proficient (me included), and the extra steps to go to a cadd operator and back can be a pain.
If you have a surface (as you stated), and I assume the surface is already in Civil 3D, probably the easiest way to get Z values is to drape the desired alignment onto the existing surface. This should be relatively easy for anyone - just look into help for 'how to drape a feature line onto the surface', no extensive CAD expertise required. Draping a feature line (polyline that represents alignment) onto the surface will pick up all the Z values along the polyline off the surface. For the river crossing, you will probably need to add soundings reading manually (unless river bottom was also surveyed and part of the surface).
2 points determine a straight line. A little math in a spreadsheet will give the coordinates every 25' as follows.
Example:
Point 1 N = 100, E = 200
Point 2 N = 600, E = 400
Total east displacement = 400 - 200 = 200
Total north displacement = 600 - 100 = 500
Total length of line = (200^2 + 500^2)^0.5 = 538.5
East increment for 25' line segment = 200 *25/538.5 = 9.3
north increment for 25' line segment = 500*25/538.5 = 23.2
So coordinates for each successive point will be previous point plus the increment. ie next point =
N = 100 +23.2 = 123.2
E = 200 + 9.3 = 209.3
This can be easily programed into a spreadsheet to generate a table of point values. Add the Z values to those points and then copy and paste from the spreadsheet directly into your alignment table in gINT. No CADD required.