SpaTools: Create Buffer Around PolyLines





In the continuation of my last post about buffer around points, I have developed another tool to create buffer polygons around/along the linear AutoCAD objects such as Polylines and Splines. Buffer  is one of the vital tool of Spatial Analysis and it is often needed to create buffers along the linear features such as roads, canals, railway lines etc.


To create buffer along a polyline manually is not a One Click operation in AutoCAD rather following operations are needed to create buffer polygons along a single polyline:

  • Offset the polyline object on both sides using OFFSET command. This will create the two identical polylines on each side.
  • Creating two more polylines to close the ends of both offset lines
  • Joining all the polylines to create a closed polyline.

In case, if there are hundreds of the polylines, this operation becomes hectic. Though, merge polygons tool can be used to merge the polylines, but still it is time consuming and inefficient method.

In order to automate the process of creation of buffer polygon along linear features, “Create Buffer Around Polylines/Splines” is developed and now added to SpaTools toolbar ribbon.

SpaTools Toolbar

Click on “Create Buffer Around Polylines / Splines” to execute the command.

The buffer distance is the primary input which can be entered on the command prompt. The distance should be a non-zero positive number. The second input to the command is to select Yes or No to merge the objects. If No is selected, it will draw the buffer polygons around the selected Polyline or Spline objects and will not merge individual buffer polygons as depicted below:



If Yes is selected, it will merge all the buffer polygons. The overlapping buffer polygons will be merged together as closed Polyline object.



The updated SpaTools DLL can be downloaded from Cadomation.

Read the installation instructions from this blog. 





Comments

  1. okanlawon17 June 2020 at 16:12

    It's really good but for it not supporting line feature is only the constraint. However, you can improve on its functionality by including direction or side which is going to buffer..

    For instance, I know that buffer works with dual side for a line but it won't be new if u couldn't make an addition to your own development..

    Yours should be able to select side just the way u made it to select merging options. Most often, buffer is not needed for two sides but only one. If yours could be able to do such task then, u are a step ahead of conventional buffer tool.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SpaTools: Import Lidar Point Cloud (LAS/LAZ) files into AutoCAD

Image
Point clouds are large data sets composed of 3D point data. These geographic point data is collected mostly by Laser scanners and drones equipped with LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors. In addition to these directly collected LIDAR point cloud data, the aerial RGB images collected by drones are processed using Image Processing & Computer Vision Algorithm based software such as Pix4D, Agisoft Photoscan or DroneDeploy to produce RGB Point Clouds in LAS file format. Besides that, the well known image processing software such as ERDAS Imagine Leica Photogrammetry Suite (LPS), ENVI and PCI Geomatica produce output in LAS file format when stereo/tri-stereo satellite images (WorldView-2, WorldView-3, SOPT 5/6/7 & Pleiades) are processed.     LAS is an industry standard file format defined by the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) that includes a system of point classification. A processed LAS file may have points classified as bare earth,
Read more

How to Clip objects in AutoCAD

Image
There is a tool named as CLIP in ArcGIS which cut out a piece of one feature class using one or more of the features in another feature class as a cookie cutter. This is particularly useful for creating a new feature class as study area or area of interest (AOI) that contains a geographic subset of the features in another, larger feature class. It is often needed to CLIP all the objects contained completely inside a polygon to a new drawing. The type of the objects may vary from simple objects like polylines, lines, circles, text to complex objects like splines, arcs, hatches, blocks etc. Since the release of AutoCAD 2008, a new command EXPORTLAYOUT was introduced to export all the objects in all the viewports of the layout to a separate drawing. I am writing this article because most of the CAD users are not aware about the power of this magical command of Autocad and use TRIM command to trim all the objects one by one which are outside of the desired polygon. It is h
Read more

SpaTools: Extract Topographic Profile From Contours In AutoCAD

Image
A topographic map is simply the two dimensional representation of a portion of three dimensional surface of earth. Topographic maps provide the detailed information about the natural and man-made aspects of the terrain, but are best known for their series of contour lines that show elevation changes, and colors signifying varying land types and bodies of water. Contour lines are used to determine elevations and are lines on a map that are produced from connecting points of equal elevation (elevation refers to height in feet, or meters, above sea level). By reading contour lines, one can measure the steepness of a hill, the height of a mountain, and even the depth of a lake or Ocean . The contours can be generated by a DEM (Digital Elevation Model), TIN (Triangular Irregular Network) or a surface using different software such as ArcGIS.  Read the blog about How to generate contours from DEM and create a topographic map in Autocad. Most of the topographic maps used for plann
Read more

Creating Contour Maps in ArcGIS and Conversion to AutoCAD drawing

Image
A topographic map is simply the two dimensional representation of a portion of three dimensional surface of earth. Topographic maps provide the detailed information about the natural and man-made aspects of the terrain, but are best known for their series of contour lines that show elevation changes, and colors signifying varying land types and bodies of water. Contour lines are used to determine elevations and are lines on a map that are produced from connecting points of equal elevation (elevation refers to height in feet, or meters, above sea level). By reading contour lines, one can measure the steepness of a hill, the height of a mountain, and even the depth of a lake or ocean . These lines are evenly spaced apart. This spacing is called the contour interval. For example, if your map uses a 10-foot contour interval, you will see contour lines for every 10 feet (3 meters) of elevation -- lines at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and so on. Different maps use different intervals, dependin
Read more

Why GIS users should learn AutoCAD?

Image
My last recent posts are titled with prefix of SpaTools . SpaTools is a .NET DLL developed using AutoCAD .Net API, where scripts, routines, macros and programs written in VBA and Lisp by me are integrated into a single DLL file using C# Language. The major motives to develop such a DLL and share it with fellow professionals are its portability, scalability and integrity. Till now, tools for clipping objects, extracting topographic profiles from contours, Cut polygons, annotating an alignment with chainages, creating a convex hull, and some others of the simpler sort are included. SpaTools was tried, tested and appreciated in the CAD community. Feedbacks were received with requests for additional programs/tools to be included. On the contrary, the GIS community was silent. This was awkward since GIS (Geographic Information System) is a “ System to Collect, Store, Analyze and represent the Spatial Data ”. Following were some views from GIS professionals, upon inquiry: They
Read more

SpaTools: Toolbar with all tools

Image
Since January 2020, I started writing blogs about the custom tools developed for AutoCAD. All those blogs are entitled with the prefix of “SpaTools” . Currently, ten (10) different tools have been added to SpaTools.DLL . For each tool, I have published a blog with the explanation of its usability and some basic information. The readers not only appreciated it but also suggested to improve and extend it further by adding more tools such as Export CSV, KML, LAS, GPX, SHP etc and other cartographic tools. Besides that, it was suggested by some users to develop it as a Toolbar . In the response of that suggestion, I have developed it as a toolbar. The DLL file can be downloaded from the link  at the bottom of this page. Prior to loading in AutoCAD, unblock it. Right Click on the DLL file and check the unblock checkbox and apply. Load the DLL into AutoCAD using NETLOAD command.    The commands are categorized into three panels:  Import , Create Features and Cartography &
Read more