Create vertical lines from point reference

[francois28]

I am working on a horizontal directional drill with multiple survey points.

 

The survey points make up (what looks like an upside down dome) and they are all connected with polylines. I need to add straight vertical lines to each point. Of course I can do this manually, but I'm wondering if there's a way to automate it. I've tried Lee's point manager, but it seems the problem is there's no option for xstart, xend, and ystart, yend.

I also tried created a block out of a line then importing that on the points with point manager, but I need all of the lines to end at the same position at the top. This doesnt work because as you can see the points aren't all equal from the bottom. I also cannot find a way to trim blocks. I was hoping blocks would have the same xstart and xend, etc. as a line, but they don't.

 

Any help would be appreciated, it seems like there should be some sort of easy way to do this.

[JD Mather]

You might make them all longer than needed and then use extrim to trim all at once to a reference line.

[francois28]

Does extrim trim blocks or would this be for polylines only? I would love to do this, but I can't get vertical lines imported automatically with pointmanager. They're always horizontal and connecting the points. I have tried extrim with a vertical line converted to a block and it doesn't seems to work. Something I'm doing wrong?

[JD Mather]

I don't think it will work with blocks.

Have you verified how extrim works without blocks?

 

How many points are you talking about?

How often do you need to do this?

 

If a one-off and not too many points I would set my osnap to Node - create one line and then copy at the other nodes, then extrim.

 

Is there any sort of pattern - say regular x interval?

[francois28]

I don't think it will work with blocks.

Have you verified how extrim works without blocks?

 

How many points are you talking about?

How often do you need to do this?

 

If a one-off and not too many points I would set my osnap to Node - create one line and then copy at the other nodes, then extrim.

 

Is there any sort of pattern - say regular x interval?

 

I have verified how extrim works, and it's great with regular lines. If I could get the lines imported this way, there would be no problem at all.

 

We're talking hundreds of points per drawing. And this will need to be done very often, every drawing that I do. Unfortunately there is no real pattern. The survey shots (each point) are taken at the end of each joint of pipe, which varies in length from retooling, damage, etc. The depth also fluctuates obviously because of drilling.

 

I attached two images to show what I'm trying to do. One shows without the vertical (green lines) and the other that I input manually.

[Organic]

I would have done what JD suggested and manually copied a line to each point and trimmed them all. Although if you have to do this many times over (as I imagine you will with many cross sections) then that is not really viable. Only other suggestion I can think of at the moment is to make a copy of the points, modify the block definition to add the 'green line' to it, explode them all, select all the green lines and paste them back onto the (unexploded blocks) cross section and then trim the lines.

 

What exactly is being drilled/bored there?

 

Can you upload one of the cross sections here as a .dwg?

[BIGAL]

In a lisp etc it would be pretty easy to get a points x,y,z and draw a line to a known datum using the x value and a new y value like dink post dwg.

[francois28]

A lisp would be great. I'm not familiar with writing them and am having a hard time finding one specific for my situation.

I attached the dwg for more info.

nac2_Display (new ucs).dwg

[Jack_O'neill]

I am no programmer, but in post #8 of this thread: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?63320-Help-drawing-lines&highlight=lines+points Lee has a lisp that draws lines from all the selected points to a single point. I wonder if it would be possible to modify that code to draw the lines perpendicular to a line instead of to a point? If so, all you'd need to do is draw a line where you want them to end, then start this lisp, grab the points with a crossing, pick the line and see them pop it...if that's possible. Like I said, I'm no programmer, just thinking out loud.

[BIGAL]

ok a couple more questions easy part is drawing vertical line.

 

Is vert line from end of a line as lines do not join properly! or is it from centre of circles ?

 

The distance labelled I guess you want this also is 30' longer than text value ?

 

Why not go back further where is the point data coming from a CSV file ? I would do it all in one go plan and long section.

 

please post a sample file of source data.

[francois28]

Hey BIGAL, thanks for the response.

 

The lines are coming from the middle of the circles. I'm not sure why the lines don't connect properly. The initial drawing (without the green lines and text) come from an output of a surveying program. I'm kind of wondering if I would be better off just going from the CSV data as you mentioned so the lines will actually connect correctly.

 

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean by "The distance labelled I guess you want this also is 30' longer than text value ?"

I think you may be talking about like where the text ends on the grid that's shown. Which, on there it ends around 30ft. from the "ground" which is the red line going across the drawing. If so, then yeah that's fine. It doesn't particularly matter, it just needs to be in a spot where it will be clean and readable.

 

I'm attaching the CSV with all the data points in them.

Nac1_DirectionalData.csv

[BIGAL]

ok a start I thought I would take the excel approach rather than lisp

 

in your spread sheet

 

Put the word Line in Q2

in q3 put =CONCATENATE(B2,",",C2) this will give a x,y answer

copy q3 down to bottom

open notepad... Autocad recoginises excel as an OLE so by pasting into notepad it converts automatically to text.

copy column Q starting at the word line and then paste into notepad you should see

line

0,-4811.5

31.5,-4780.3

63,-4749.2

put blank line on end

 

Now just copy the lines of text in notepad and paste them to the autocad command line a series of joined lines should now appear hint change line to pline

 

We have just written a program to do something automatically in Autocad wow !!!

 

using this technique and excel you should be able to create what you want just create a column for each step horizontal points, vertical points then calculate length of vertical line use the concatenate =CONCATENATE("line"," ",B2,",",C2," ",R2) where column r is the new x,y allowing for your datum again a concatenate.

 

Take each column and paste into notepad save it as a script file .SCR then from Autocad Script and your filename.

 

Whilst this a manual/auto approach it could be fully automated using lisp etc using the same sequence of reading a CSV created from excel.

[francois28]

Thanks so much for the help BIGAL. That's going to save me SO many hours and way less errors.

 

I think the big thing I was missing was how the actual format should be in to paste it into cad. But now I see how.

 

And of course excel is going to speed that up very very much.

Thanks again!