AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017 - Convert Blocks to Points

By Justin Doughty

With Civil 3D we sometimes receive data that’s in AutoCAD format, or has been translated via other products to dwg, and need to quickly convert the information to something we can use inside of Civil 3D. For this example, it is AutoCAD blocks, converting to points, and then a surface. But this process can be done on any drawing element, even the insertion point of a piece of text.

So the first thing to do is pick one of these blocks, right click and select similar, then right click isolate objects, so only the blocks are visible.

We next go to the Insert tab>Linking & Extraction>Extract Data:

Select object in the drawing and draw a selection window around everything.

Next, just tick the blocks 

Then just tick the XYZ Positions:

Output the results to a file ( I chose csv)

In Excel you can now build your PENZ file, add a new column for the point number. WARNING some of these points may have no Z value, or the decimal place can be in the wrong place, take time to review the file:

Finally bring in the “points from file” in civil 3D using the PENZ point file format, and you should have something like below: