Importing Shapefiles

Mike

I work for a small civil engineering firm, and when working with GIS data, we often have to import shapefiles into our drawings. In Civil 3D this was a simple process (for the most part) using MAPIMPORT. I've noticed that this feature doesn't appear to be built into BricsCAD. I found a very useful third party add on for doing this, but it would cost the company a minimum of around $200 per seat for each person in the office to have a copy to work with. Are there any other add-ons which aren't so prohibitively expensive?

I've used QGIS, but when exporting to DWG format, it includes a lot of hatches and other objects which we don't want in the file, and it also doesn't work well for contours. In addition, an app or add-on which works within BricsCAD is preferable, one which will work with various datums which we use.

Thanks!

Chris Schildmeier

We've been using: http://www.dotsoft.com/mapworks.htm for years. Amazing third party application, and the developer is incredibly responsive.

-Chris

Terry Dotson

Thanks for the mention Chris. If the OP has a very limited budget, our GeoLocationPlus add-on will handle the shapefiles and a lot more. However if the OP is giving up Civil3D they may miss more than MAPIMPORT over time and MapWorks may help fill the void (we have quantity discounts).

Mike

@Terry Dotson said:
Thanks for the mention Chris. If the OP has a very limited budget, our GeoLocationPlus add-on will handle the shapefiles and a lot more. However if the OP is giving up Civil3D they may miss more than MAPIMPORT over time and MapWorks may help fill the void (we have quantity discounts).

Terry, I used one Dotsoft's other tool sets under Civil 3D a while back, and it was useful, for sure. The problem is that my boss isn't looking to pay for functionality we previously had under Civil 3D. Anything we use would ultimately be limited in its scope of usefulness, as we only have to import shapefiles on rare occasion; once we've grabbed a county's GIS data, it gets saved in our library as a dwg, and then it's done.

QGIS has proven useful for importing most shapefiles, but I've been unable to get it to assign elevations to the contour lines it generates and exports to dxf.

Mike

@Terry Dotson , when importing shapefiles with GeoLocation+, does it assign elevation values to the polylines? Using MAPIMPORT in Civil 3D ended up requiring a whole querying process in order to accomplish this. Is there a way to filter the selection by elevation? For instance, if I wanted to select only 10' index contours so that I could place them on their own layer, would I be able to do this?

I ask because I'm running out of other things to try, and I'm going to need to be able to sell this idea to my boss.

Terry Dotson

The ultra low cost GeoLocation+ does not contain surface functionality. The MapWorks product Chris mentioned contains tools to elevate based on Shapefile data, and even separate contours into layers based on a designated index value. However given your bosses reluctance to invest in anything else and your rare occasion of needing it, I doubt it would work out.

Perhaps you should approach your existing product developers asking them to enhance the product you have already invested in, especially if you are on their annual software maintenance. In other words, let them earn it.

Mike

@Terry Dotson said:
The ultra low cost GeoLocation+ does not contain surface functionality. The MapWorks product Chris mentioned contains tools to elevate based on Shapefile data, and even separate contours into layers based on a designated index value. However given your bosses reluctance to invest in anything else and your rare occasion of needing it, I doubt it would work out.

Perhaps you should approach your existing product developers asking them to enhance the product you have already invested in, especially if you are on their annual software maintenance. In other words, let them earn it.

I've been attempting this. I submitted a feature request a while back, but no word so far. I'm going to give GeoLocation a shot and see if it works for us. Might be that we won't need MapWorks, at least not yet.