Have you ever wished a Civil 3D Cogo Point object could support multiple elevations and/or descriptions?
For example, you have monitoring wells on your project that report chemical contamination levels. You collect this information and need to display changes over time. You try and present the information in Civil 3D and are limited to a single elevation and single description for each Cogo Point. As a result, you must create and maintain multiple Cogo Points to accomplish your task.
Perhaps you have numerous attributes (descriptions) you would like to view or label on a Point Object. Once again, by default a Cogo Point would only allow you a single description.
Taking it step further… Wouldn’t it be great if (in addition to supporting multiple elevations and descriptions) Civil 3D Cogo Points could access the additional elevation and description information from an external Microsoft Access Database? That would be an incredibly powerful tool on a number of levels.
The great news is that all of this is possible TODAY through Point XDREFs!!
In short, by using a Point XDREF, Civil 3D will match a point number in your Civil 3D model to a corresponding point number in the key column within a Microsoft Access database. From there, you can leverage Point Groups to display, label and use this external information in many ways including building surfaces to analyze the data.
Watch the brief video below to see how it works.
If you would like to try what is shown in the demo, you can download a "Civil Kit" containing the ASCII point file and Microsoft Access Database used in the presentation by clicking on the following link. PointXDREFs Civil Kit
-Jerry
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