The effects of breaklines:
Use breaklines to define features, such as retaining walls, curbs, tops of ridges, and streams. Breaklines force surface triangulation along the breakline preventing triangulation across the breakline.
Breaklines are critical to creating an accurate surface model because it is the interpolation of the data, not only the data itself, that determines the shape of the model.
Tutorial Exercise: Adding Breaklines to a Surface
Topics in this section
- Types of Breaklines
Define standard, proximity, wall, and non-destructive breaklines for a TIN surface.
- Creating Standard Breaklines
Use the Add Breaklines dialog box to create standard breaklines.
- Creating Proximity Breaklines
Use the Add Breaklines dialog box to define proximity breaklines that reference surface points in proximity to the vertices of the polyline that you select as the breakline.
- Creating Wall Breaklines
Use the Add Breaklines dialog box to define features, such as retaining walls or curbs as breaklines.
- Creating Non-Destructive Breaklines
Use the Add Breaklines dialog box to create a non-destructive breakline from either a grading feature line or an open or closed AutoCAD object.
- Importing Breaklines from a File
Use the Add Breaklines dialog box to import breaklines from a file. The supported file format is .flt (ASCII file format).
- Creating Breakline Data in a Text File
Use a text editor to create a breakline file manually.
- Viewing Breakline Information
Use the Prospector list view and Breakline Properties vista to view a breakline description, type, and vertices, as well as to zoom or pan to a breakline and its vertices.
- Editing Breaklines
Edit any breaklines that you have defined by selecting it in the drawing. You can insert, move, and delete vertices, as well as redefine the elevation at a selected vertex.
- Inserting Breakline Data into a Drawing
Insert breaklines into a drawing as AutoCAD polylines.