This is a lengthy explanation so I’ll do my best to break it down as much as I can, but in summary I was trying to develop a Dynamo graph that translates a Civil 3D surface between grid and ground coordinates using a surveyor provided combined factor.
My first attempt was one where I simply modified the surface vertices and got very fast results, but I was getting different triangulation between the two surfaces, so I abandoned that approach. Instead, I built a Python node that does the following:
- Extract the triangles from the original surface
- Get the XYZ of each of the three points from those triangles
- Scale the XY of those points
- Create 3D Faces using those scaled points
- Add those faces to a new surface
- Extracted the border from the original surface
- Extracted the XYZs of the points that make up that boundary
- Scaled the XY of those points
- Added those scaled points to the boundary definition of the transformed surface
At this point, when I ran it on a test surface, I got the following results below.
You can see that the total number of points and triangles are identical, and the max elevation is the same, but the minimum and mean are different which is neither the desired nor the expected outcome. If all Z elevations between the two surfaces are the same, I’d expect that the min, mean, and max elevations would be exactly the same. This was performed on a surface that is included with Civil 3D.
As a second test I ran it on the surface from an actual project and again the total number of points and triangles are identical, but this time the min and max elevations are identical, but the mean is different, once again indicating that one or more points are different.
I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong, so I then output the data XYZ data from both the original and transformed surface into text files. I then used Python to analyze the point data and the script I wrote seems to indicate that the two surfaces have the identical number of Z points and elevations. I’ve tried everything I can think of, so I wanted to have someone else review this and see if it’s related to some internal rounding issue or from an incorrect assumption I made about how the data is being generated in Dynamo (or how I used the API which I am only beginning to learn).
I’ve attached the Dynamo graph but couldn’t upload the C3D drawing, but the sample drawing I made simply used the XML file “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2021\C3D\Help\Civil Tutorials\Existing Ground Surface.xml” to do testing.
Grid to Ground Surface Transform.dyn (14.6 KB)
