Civil 3D – Missing Point Label Controls

Very often people run into problems when their Points lose their controls.  The label controls, like drag label, rotate, etc.  This is caused by the elevation being NULL.

You may also notice in the image below that the label spacing is funky. We will cover that in another session.

When the Point is styled to display ‘using Point Elevation’, the point is physically elevated to elevation value.  When the Point elevation is NULL, it sends it to a default that is something like memory limit.  1.00E+20.

When inversing between #4566 and #4596, we get horizontal distance, but when inversing between #4566, and #4304, we get 1.00E+20, the same as the vertical distance.

A similar phenomenon occurs when point scaling.  My guess is that it is either a view memory limitation to something that is “beyond visible range”, or that the programming kills the control grips in this instance.

Either way, the solution is to format the Point label Style to ‘Flatten Points to Elevation”, and set to 0.

An alternative is to set the NULL Point elevations to 0 or some nominal value deemed to be invalid. The problem forsee is that if using the points at elevation was so important, these Null elevation points would not give accurate results, if given nominal values.