Technical data

Working with Surface Output and Visualization Tools
197
Creating Contours from a Surface
When you create contours from a surface, you use a contour style that
controls how the contour and contour labels appear. For example, a
contour style controls smoothing, grip display for editing contours
and their labels, the text style used for labels, and the label position.
When you create contours, you choose a style to use and you can also
specify elevation ranges, contour intervals, and whether to create the
contours as AEC contour objects or polylines. All contour definition,
editing, and labeling commands work on both contour objects and
polylines.
NOTE Because AEC contour objects are custom objects, they must be
exploded if you want to edit them in a flavor of AutoCAD other than
AutoCAD Land Development Desktop. Or, you must install the Object
Enabler, which is available on your AutoCAD Land Development
Desktop CD-ROM.
When you create contours from a surface, you base the contours on a
contour style. Use the Contour Style Manager to define and edit
contour styles.
Key Concepts
■
Contour styles store groups of settings in the drawing so you can
use them again without having to manually reset the settings you
want to use.
■
You choose a contour style to use when you run the Create
Contours command on the Terrain menu.