Tag Archives: surfaces

Diagnosing the Surface Pasting Problem – “Error Performing Edit”

We all get these from time to time. Unfortunately Civil 3D is rather vague about what is causing this error.

  or  2016 error adding boundary

^^^^ I HATE YOU ^^^^^

I can tell you empirically that the primary cause almost 99% of the time is a boundary that has been added to a surface somewhere along the chain that needs to be cleaned up.

A few people will suggest using things like MAPCLEAN and WEEDFEATURES to fix over complicated boundaries lines and breaklines and these methods do help. But they don’t always work.

A great method for fix this is to use the OVERKILL command. It will remove overlapping segments that are duplicates within a polygon. Commonly this comes from output from other software!

overkill commandoverkill result

If you still have no luck try a method that I have used for years. Simply “STEPPEDOFFSET it out and then STEPPEDOFFSET it back in” maybe 0.5m or so.. (note: occasionally you may need to offset it back in 1 mm different, so back in 0.499m)

I have over exaggerated this to explain the issue, but here is what an offset does to a messy line with overlaps and duplicate vertices

Just whatever you do, don’t go extracting the triangles and re-adding them to a surface!!!!

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Osnaps and overlapping surfaces causes civil 3d to freeze/crash

Well after some basic investigation I have found the problem.

Overlapping surfaces that both have contours displayed will cause freezing when osnaps is turned on.

Download the example file here – onsnaps-freeze1,  see image below for explanation. Try and draw a polyline over the top of the overlapping area with onsnaps turned on

I can confirm that this happens in both Civil 3D 2014 and 2015. With 2015 recovering slighltly faster than 2014. say 3-5 minutes instead of 10 – 15minutes

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