Hi, I have been testing Autodesk Forma with Dynamo for Civil 3D. I tried importing Terrain as a TIN Surface.
The only thing I am missing is to get the coordinate system so I can create the surface in the correct coordinates. How to do it?
@mzjensen how did you do this with your Civil exploration 
?
@Drbohlav right now, the Terrain in Forma will be set according to Sea Level, but that is not represented when it comes into Dynamo (As Forma does some magic). We’re working on better ways to work with and represent things 
My exploration was focused on proving that the connection can work, so I didn’t dive into coordinate system translations.
@solamour, looking forward to further development and great new features. But I am not clear yet what is the main purpose of linking Dynamo for Civil 3D and Forma. Can you give me some thoughts on why it is beneficial to use Dynamo for Civil 3D with Autodesk Forma? What advantages do you see? Using it with Dynamo for Revit or Dynamo Sandbox I can understand.
Hi @Drbohlav. I’m a developer at the Forma side 
So if I understand your need correctly, you would like a node like ‘GetRefPoint’ that returns the SRID of the coordinate system and the point which is 0,0 in the Forma geometry. And then you would project the geometry on your end to place it correctly?
An example of this data would be:
{ srid: 32634, point: [333351.3457154673, 6579919.570756194] }
We do also have the proj4 string: +proj=utm +zone=34 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs
Would this data let you do this, or is it something more your require or a format that would make it convenient?
Hmm… Perhaps elevation as well?
From my perspective I’d like to see it returned as a coordinate system relative to the internal origin (or the parts to make such a coordinate system) so we could just do a Geometry.Transform before pushing to another platform. Really curious to know what would be most helpful for Civil 3D users though as my methodology might be too focused on building uses.
The z in the geometry is given from the sea level. So the x, y offset should be the only one that is needed to know where in the world the geometry is located.
Could you give an example of the parts to make up such a coordinate system?
I’ll spin up a separate conversation so as to not derail the Civil 3D aspects of the thread.
Hi @jacob.small, for example I work with Civil 3D template where CzechJTSK/5b.Krovak coordinate system is set. It would be nice if Forma project have the ability to set coordinate system same as it is possible in InfraWorks
Do you know if Forma has that data in the UI? If not I feel like that is going to take a bit to get produced. @havardh may have better insights to share.
We do not have this, and do not have a plan for going in this direction. For now we have handled this on the integration boarders into and out of Forma (e.g. import/export, data order or Revit/Rhino addins).
I think there are three main ways of doing this:
The trade-off between 2 and 3 is that we would need to add support for every coordinate system, but we would do the work of projection for the user. On the other hand with option 3 we’re requiring the user to do the work, but we do not need to do any changes when the user uses a new coordinate system.
For the current beta phase of the integration I’m very much suggesting we go with option 3. This is the most flexible for the user and the cheapest on our end to support long term.
Hi @Drbohlav, could you give us some more insight into what use cases you (or your clients) are interested in when connecting Forma and Civil 3D via Dynamo? I think that will help us clarify how to proceed.
Hi @mzjensen, for example at this moment I’m working on some analysis using Map 3D in Civil 3D. The result is polygons that meet the conditions might be nice to import into Forma. This is addressed by solar power plant designers, for example. First they need to identify the right property areas based on the attributes at the polygons and based on analysis from other data e.g. shapefiles.
Hi Lukas
Yes. Version 1.1.0 of the DynamoFormaBeta includes the GetFormaProject node which exposes both the srid+refPoint and proj4string.
Sorry I forgot about update this thread. Please let me know if you are able to solve your usecase with this node 
-Håvard
I found a coordinate that might help: [Video] Frederic Classon on LinkedIn: #forma #design #dynamo #civil3d #arcgis #autodeskemploye #bim #gis | 11 comments
Hi, thank you. I don’t know how to use it at the moment. Do you have any example please? Is there any link to Dynamo graph example?
At this moment I tested this with one point only and I used epsg.io web page for coordinates transformation.
@Drbohlav: Here is an example.
I am using the pyproj python package to project a point in the UTM zone of the project to the target projection. This library is a bit flexible with the input definition so I’m both using the ESPG:5514 as a string and the proj4 string.
Please follow up if you have any issues with applying this method We use proj4 extensively internally to make these projections.
FYI @solamour @emrullah.yildiz if the Forma team is using it a lot this might be a good python tool to add to the standard library.
