solidedit

[Peter G]

Hi,

Is any one having proplems with solidedit? In that it is MISSING!! Not listed in modify or when typed into command bar says, "The command is not available".

Running MSCAD 2010 Premium.

Any answers please.

Peter Gurney

[Brian Sloman]

Hi, MicroSurvey CAD does not contain any of the solids editing commands which are available in some other IntelliCAD products. The reason for this is it would incur additional licensing fees for us to include them in our MicroSurvey products, and since they are not needed for the vast majority of our users this is a way of keeping the prices down for everybody.
If you require solids editing capabilities, you may want to consider looking into using MicroSurvey inCAD 2010, which runs inside AutoCAD 2009 or 2010 and therefore has the full set of AutoCAD commands.

[Peter G]

Hi Brian,

Thanks very much for the reply. inCAD looks good. So the big question now is, which I should have put on the inCAD forum is. HOW can I turn a TIN into a solid? Tried all the solid and surface commands nothing works.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Peter

[Brian Sloman]

Hi, MSCAD can draw TIN's as either Lines, 3DFaces, or Polyfaces - depending on which option you select in the TIN command - but never as Solids. I am not very familiar with solid-type entities since they are not used by any of our MicroSurvey commands, but if you do some google searching you may come across a means of converting from a Polyface Mesh to a Solid. For example, a search for "polyface to solid" or "convert polyface mesh to solid" has a few hits you may want to look into.

[Peter G]

Hi. Thanks for the info. Most of the stuff out doesn't really like the polyface mesh as it thinks that its a polygon mesh and says that its open and can not turn it into a solid. But I did find this at the Autodesk support web site very helpful and easy to use.

1)Have your Surface style display Triangles (Eigher create your TIN into 3DFaces or explode it into 3DFaces)
2)Use the _AeccSurfaceExtractObjects command in order to extract the Triangles and obtain 3D FACEs
3)Set your view to Isometric and draw a vertical line (the length of the extrusion you would like to obtain from one triangle vertex)
4)Use the EXTRUDE command with the Direction option. Select the 3D faces, then select the start and end point of your line for the direction (All 3D faces will get extruded vertically)
5)UNION all those new 3D Solids...
6)In case you get a message "the maximum number of history mode would be exceeded... then run the BREP command and select all the solids to remove their history.
7)Run again the UNION command to union all those solids.

Now you should have one big solid.
The bottom of the ground is not flat but reflect the top surface.So make a big box over your new solid and put the top of the box higher than the highest part of the ground. Then SUBTRACT your solid from the box and you are left with a bottom flat.

Hope this is useful to someone else.

Peter