I would really love for FME to be able to read Civil3D surfaces. If you export a surface in Civil3d as a LandXML, FME will read the surface with the XML reader, but wont have the correct outer boundary. If I extract the outer boundary of the surface in Civil3d then I can clip the surface triangles using this boundary. This is too much pre-processing and you would have to export a new XML file and boundary every time you update the surface. I would love to be able to use FME to read a Civil3D surface directly from the dwg file with the correct outer boundary. I haven't tried writing the surface back out to a dwg, I would mostly use this for CAD to GIS purposes.

I believe yes, you can create triangles and a 3d boundary using Civil3D and then read them into FME and recreate as a surface. Then you can write it out as a surface to DWG.

It makes me wonder why we can't read a Civil3D surface, but can read/write them in plain DWG. I suppose there must be something special about Civil3D entities that we don't yet support.

Any updates on this question from 2013?

Still would be good to be able to read a surface directly from a Civil3D DWG

Hi @kelvin.jenkins​,

Surfaces can be read with the Civil3D Reader in current versions of FME. You can find more information on geometry types supported by the Civil3D Reader here: https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Desktop_Documentation/FME_ReadersWriters/civil3d/quick_facts_civil3d.htm

Great thanks