How to generate Stake Out data from InRoads Surface

Well, the grid is easy.

Surface > View Surface > Surface Elevations.
Mode: Grid Point
Interval: 5 (or whatever)

Uncheck the 'Elevation' box, and only check the 'Point' box. Double-click the Point symbology, and change the Display to Circle. This way, you don't get a bunch of vertices, giving you bogus points. Put them on their own level too.

Once you click Apply, isolate them by level, put a Fence around them, and use the Export Coordinates in the XYZ Text tool.This will give you a XYZ text file of the grid coords. Then you can import that text file into an FWD, and at that point, you can export it to whatever format you need, or use 'Survey Data To Geometry' to run an XML report on the COGO points.

It sounds like a bunch of cockamaimey workaround, but if you're an experienced InRoads user (which you are), it won't take you much more than 10-15 minutes or so.

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As far as the features/breaklines, there's the Tools > XML Reports > Surfaces report. It gives the NEZ of all the feature points, and it DOES list the name of each feature, so you know which point goes with which feature; it's not just thousands of coordinates with no way of knowing what they're for. As far as getting those specific points along the features, along with random points at an interval, I see some serious manual work in your future, probably more than what is practically feasible. Import as Alignments? Throw some Event Points on them? See what I mean by feasibility? lol

You could also try changing the Point Density Interval on all the features to a specific interval that you want. This can be done "wholesale" in the Feature Properties box. I don't know if that will add additional points to the report or not.

Hi Jeff,

thanks for the reply. As many here would know, I'm a "GEOPAKer.."; still pretty green when it comes to InRoads.

I appreciate the help.

I've attempted the XML report solution you provided for the feature/breaklines, but don't get a result.

There are 3 reports listed for Surfaces. Quantities, Surface Input Format and Surface Input Format Extended and none of these display any data when following the steps provided.

Both of the "Surface Input..." reports do recognize the surface name. And the surface has 2 features listed when selected in the Surfaces Report dialog.

Assuming I've done something wrong here... any ideas?

Thanks again.

Hello again Jeff,

I've worked through the first portion of your solution.

After placing the circles into the graphics (as you suggested), I thought there must be a method to import those points (circles) directly to COGO.

I created a new COGO file, selected all the points/circles (there are 69).

I went to File>Import>Geometry>From Graphics>Cogo Points.

It created 483 points (7 points for each selected circle).

While I cant really explain why that happened, if I had created "points" (zero length lines) in the first place, maybe I'd only get one COGO point per selected element.

Is there a way to draw points from the Surface > View Surface > Surface Elevations tool?

Thanks,

OK.. I thought I had figured out that if you write the elevations to the DGN and NOT the Points, that when the elevations are selected and imported to COGO, they come in as a single point with the correct XYZ values.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an offset of some sort. The actual surface point locations are not the XY values stored to COGO.

Looks like I'm back to finding a method to display the surface points as POINTS.
 
Next questions.
How to:
1) Display those COGO Point Numbers in the DGN.
2) Create a graphical table that shows the Point Number, X, Y, Z for each point.