Learn about the process of adding data into surfaces when dealing with a new survey, including concepts like breaklines, contours, point groups, and boundaries. Understand how to handle situations when point groups might get out of date in Civil 3D.
Key Insights
- The most common definitions used in day-to-day work with surveys are breaklines, contours, and point groups. These are usually edited after being introduced into the data.
- If contour lines are running through a building and are not required to be displayed, a hide boundary is used to make these lines disappear from within the building footprint.
- While working with Civil 3D, point groups can sometimes get out of date, indicated by a yellow shield symbol with an exclamation point. One can right click, select properties and make sure everything is selected as desired to remedy this situation.
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In this video, we're going to start adding some data into our surface. So, as I kind of indicated in the previous video, some of these pieces of definitions that we have here are less common than other ones.
The most common definitions that I find myself using in my day-to-day work and in my workflows are breaklines, contours, and point groups. I do editing and edits after I've brought in those three basic pieces of data, and then probably the next most common outside of those three in the edits that I deal with is boundaries. So, boundaries, I don't often use outer boundaries.
I will do Hide boundaries. So, if I have topo data or contours running through a building and I want the contours not to display, then I'll use a hide boundary to make the contour lines disappear from inside the building footprint. But other than that, I mainly work with breaklines and point groups when dealing with a brand-new survey.
And then if I have a very old topo that has just polyline contours, I use contours as data for my surfaces to do design work, but I rarely will use contour data to then create a new topo. So in our case here, we have some points that we have brought into our drawing, and so we're going to go ahead and use those points first to get the initial definition for our surface. So, I'm going to go ahead and use point groups because we've done a nice job creating this ground shot group.
Now, sometimes you can have an issue with Civil 3D as you're working that some of these point groups can become out of date. If you happen to have a little symbol here that looks like a pentagon with an exclamation point, it's like a yellow shield with an exclamation point, what you're going to do is right-click on this, select Properties, and just click through here to make sure you have everything selected the way you want it. So, go to Point Groups, then go to Raw Description Mashing, make sure you have GS selected, make sure Include is checked with GS star, make sure you're not excluding anything, you don't have to worry about your query builder or your overrides.
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If you have Point Label Style checked with Point Elevation Description, that's okay. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck it. Then I'm going to go to my points list and my summary, and I'm going to hit Apply and hit OK.
So what you should see here now is that your GS points will be displayed appropriately, and hopefully that shield will go away. So, moving on from here, I don't have that shield, so I'm good to go. I'm going to go ahead and go to my Point Groups.
So, Prospector tab, Surfaces, expanding down our Full Development, expanding down our Definitions, going to Point Groups, right-clicking, selecting Add, going to our Point Groups window here, selecting Groundshot, clicking Apply, and clicking OK. And so now, inside of here, our Groundshot points have now defined our surface. So, because of our Full Development, if you right-click and select Surface Properties, our default style, our surface style, Contours 2 and 10 Background that we modified in the first surfaces video, we now have a surface that has light-gray minor contours and dark-gray major contours.
We have a boundary being displayed, and those are the three entities that we had turned on and were being displayed. So, what I'm going to do now that we've added some data into our surface is I'm going to do a Save As. I'm going to go ahead and go File, Save As, and I'm going to save this drawing as Sieve 201 Surface, because we're now working with surfaces.
I'm going to save it to my working folder for the class. In the next video, we're going to start adding some more data into our surface.
