Hello,

I am currently doing a research on hydrodynamic simulation of a river. The roughness classes is assessed based on multispectral image. For this purpose, I need to convert my model in microstation into polygon shapefile in arcview. The model in microstation is constructed from multiple lines which form finite element mesh ( I have around 20000 elements in total). The elements are in triangular and rectangular form. With a special plug-in, I filled the triangular and rectangular with colors so later on arcview can distinguish the elements as polygons and convert it to shapefile.

Once I export the mesh to *.dxf  then read it in arcview . The problem starts here. I saw that all the rectangular elements is divided into two triangular elements. When I converted this *.dxf file into shapefile, consequently I got the rectangular elements as triangular elements.

The question is why the rectangular elements became triangulars one? and is it possible to keep this rectangular element as it is when opening in arcview?, because I need to assess the area of each rectangular elements.


Thanks alot!

Budi Gunawan