Best Practice for Converting lines, arcs segments to Smartline????

Question

I am trying to figure out what would be the best practice for converting multiple line segments and arcs to one Smartline (or complex chain I guess). Like in ACAD you would just select all your lines and PEDIT them into one polyline. So I am trying to see what is the best practice in doing the same in MicroStation? Thanks in advance and please let me know if you have any questions or need more information...

Thanks,

Chris

MicroStation V8i SS4

Thanks, 
 Chris 
 MicroStation V8i SS4

MaryB · Accepted Answer

Create Complex Chain is the tool. You can set it to Automatic and it will follow along your connections with no further clicks unless it comes to a fork, and the final click to accept. The only real issue you may run into is if there are gaps or overlaps, but you can set the gap tolerance to work around those somewhat. I believe this command even works with reference elements - as in, you can run the command and select elements in a reference file and a new complex chain will be created that runs along those elements 
 I do believe this command is responsive to the Level Lock. I can't recall offhand if it accepts a selection set (and I'm in AutoCAD today for a few more hours).

Jon Summers · Answer

The term SmartLine appears only in the UI. What the SmartLine tool does, depending on the active tool settings , is to create a complex chain of lines, line-strings, arcs and possibly other elements. 
 If you have an existing assortment of linear element types (i.e. the above and possibly others) then you can group them using the Create Complex Chain tool.

Lorys · Answer

Chris LeMay said: Looooooooooove the Automatic option. 2 clicks and done! So helpful. Thanks again!.........really 4 clicks, but who's counting.lol..okay, so I added the "Create Complex Chain" toolbox to my Workspace, so now 3 clicks......haha 
 You will find that Create Complex line or create region is not as good as ACAD's PEDIT especially multiple shapes option and join option.. in MSTN we can only do one at a time be it shapes or complex lines.. whish we had all the PEDIT functions in Mstn.. so I jump to acad to do PEDIT then back into msnt , in acad we can select several shapes or lines with pedit and use the join function and it will do lots of shapes at once!!!!!

Lorys · Answer

Hey Chris, 
 Another point that's different with polygons in mstn as to ACAD, in Mstn the fill of a region is a property of any polygon , it can be on or off can be opague or none.. this is very useful to sect areas by colour or level name and measure the total area and not count the boundary and the fill as two separate areas its one boundary so set the selection thru power selector and level chosen and use measure tool now will give total area of the selected level and objects.. for road pavements this is great... when I did it acad I got double .. I didn't draw them .. but lack of acad knowledge and how it does patterns hatch caught me out..... this is good to know and practice

Lorys · Answer

Chris LeMay said: so when you were getting double area for an area.........you were selecting the hatched area along with it's polyline perimeter to get the double area in the properties.(in ACAD)? 
 yep because it makes no difference in mstn to select the shape with crossing as the shape and fill ( not pattern) are one object with an extra attribute like colour is an attribute so is fill ..but at the time I didn't know it wasn't the same in acad.. big trap for mstn users having to just dabble in acad and not know this is different no fill attribute in acad its an pattern element with its own boundary so there are two boundaries the poly line and the pattern boundary!

Best Practice for Converting lines, arcs segments to Smartline????

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