Highlight Crossing Breaklines

Breaklines are lines or polylines that are used in surface modeling to represent a feature such as a ridge, stream or curb. Breaklines force triangulation and interpolation to occur between the vertices of the breakline, which prevents any other triangulation line from crossing the breakline.  It is important to avoid crossing breaklines in the surface model because the program cannot force triangulation along both since holding one will cross the other. Also the program cannot hold the interpolation along both because the elevation at the intersection point can be different for the two breaklines. For example, consider a breakline going from 101 to 105 and another going from 107 to 109. If these lines had an intersection at the midpoint, the elevation for one would be 103 and the other 108. This is an error that needs to be fixed by the user because those two breaklines are holding different elevations at the same point.

This command checks for intersections between the selected breaklines and then identifies any crossing breaklines by highlighting them. You can then edit these crossing breaklines before doing surface modeling such as Make 3D Grid or Triangulate & Contour.

Prompts

Ignore zero elevations [<Yes>/No]?
Reading points ...
Select surface entities to check.
Select objects: select polylines and lines
2915 found
Select objects: press Enter to conclude selection
Reading points ... 4442
122 crossing breaklines are highlighted.
Use Report Formatter [Yes/<No>]? press Enter
Minimum delta Z to report <0.0>: press Enter
Add polyline vertices at intersections [Yes/<No>]? press Enter

or
Found no crossing breaklines if there are none.Pulldown Menu Location: 3D Data >> Highlight 3D Polylines
Keyboard Command: xbar
Prerequisite: Polylines