I've been searching for nearly a week on how to import 3D data from a DGN into ArcMap. The DGN I have contains 3D polylines and 3D point features. Has anyone found a foolproof way of getting this data into Arc?
I am using the CAD to Geodatabase tool as my first process. I have tried just importing the normal unaltered 3D DGN using this tool only to get a few Point features (they show up as Point Z) in the output Geodatabase, but not all of the points in the drawing. For the ones that do, the CAD "Elevation" field is populated with 0. I do not get any Polygon or Polyline feature classes. It is consistent that I cannot get any 3D features to come in this way.
My next test was to export my DGN (from Microstation) to a 2D drawing while checking the option to "Preserve Z-Values." All of these features come in fine in the Point, Polyline, and Polygon feature classes. Unfortunately, none of the shape type fields indicate any of them containing Z-values. Again, the CAD "Elevation" fields are all populated with 0.
My end goal is to get all of the point features out of this into a feature class and to create an "ELEVATION" field that will contain each Z-value. This will then be appended to another table. Having the 3D polyline features would be a plus, but as of now the only requirement I need is Z-values for the point features.
Am I missing something? This seems like it should be something fairly simple or already supported via an out-of-the-box tool. Is there a process in Microstation that I may benefit from? I have considered exporting to a DWG if Arc handles them better. Worse come to worse I may have to export to XYZ from AutoCAD and change it to a CSV and re-name the Z column to ELEVATION and pull it in that way. I would just like to be proved wrong on this 🙂
Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!