Delve into the process of adding spot elevation and slope labels to your civil 3D drawing. Learn about the dynamic nature of the labels and the importance of surface selection, and how the software automatically updates the label according to your chosen surface.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the step-by-step process of adding spot elevation and slope labels to a civil 3D drawing, with a focus on the importance of correctly selecting the surface for the labels.
- Labels in Civil 3D are dynamic and automatically update according to the chosen surface. They are not linked to a specific location, allowing for easy adjustments.
- There are two types of slope labels: one-point and two-point labels. The one-point slope label displays the slope of the triangulation surface at a specific point, while the two-point slope label calculates and displays the slope between two selected points.
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In this video, we're going to talk about adding spot elevation and slope labels to our civil 3D drawing. So in order to do that, first, what I want to go ahead and do is I want to turn off my volume prop 13 surface.
I'm going to go ahead and right click, select surface properties. I'm going to go to my information tab, drop down and select no display and hit apply and hit okay. I'm going to go ahead and also go to my full development, right click, select surface properties, drop down to two and 10 background, click apply and click.
Okay. So from here, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to add some spot elevations and slope labels. So first we're going to talk about applying them.
And then in the next video, we'll talk about the background behind what data is in these labels. So in order to add these labels in, it's going to be the same as our parcel labels. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go up to annotate drop down.
We're going to go to surface labels. We're going to go ahead and go to spot elevation first, and then we'll do a slope label later. So I'm going to go to spot elevation.
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I'm going to go ahead and select the surface that I want to apply my spot elevation to. So you can either pick on a portion of the surface, but if you had multiple surfaces turned on and you couldn't find the correct one to click on, or it was obscured or something like that, you can just hit ENTER and a list of the surfaces that are in your drawing will show up. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is select full development, click OK.
And so now Civil 3D is asking me to select a point anywhere on the drawing where I'd like to put a spot elevation label. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go pick somewhere inside of property 27. I'm going to pick right here.
And so when I pick, you'll notice it places a label for an elevation of 26.1.01 or 261.01. Now with this label, it has the grip edits just like any other labels. We have the move, rotate label and marker or rotate marker. So just like our point labels, we have these options.
And then we have this option for move label, rotate label. So you can move label and get into a drag state. You can rotate label to rotate the text around it.
You can move the marker. You can rotate label and marker. So you can rotate the text with the marker or you can rotate just the marker.
If you were to move this, what Civil 3D is going to do is it is going to automatically update that label for you because what it is doing is it's querying the surface and determining what the elevation is at the specific location that you dropped that marker. So it is a dynamic label that updates with wherever you move it to. So you don't have to create a new label if you wanted to have one over here and you didn't want this one.
You could just go ahead and move it. And so now I've got 262.31. I could have 260.54. I could move it across the street down here and be at 263.49. So that's the great thing about
labels inside of Civil 3D is they are dynamic, especially these labels where you're going to labeling objects like surfaces. They are not necessarily linked to a specific location.
So you can go ahead and just keep moving it around and it will automatically update to whatever you need it to be. So moving on from here, we're going to go ahead and add a slope label. So I'm going to go ahead and go to annotation.
I'm going to go to my surfaces labels. I'm going to go to slope. And what Civil 3D is going to ask me is to select surface.
So I'm going to hit ENTER again. I'm going to select full development. I'm going to click okay.
Now Civil 3D is going to give me two possible questions. It's going to say, do you want a one-point slope label or a two-point? So I'm first going to do a one-point and then I'm going to go ahead and do a two-point. There are some differences here.
So I'm going to select one point. So a one-point slope label, I'm going to place it somewhere on the drawing and I'm going to go ahead and just click. And so what Civil 3D does is in that one point, it gives me the orientation of the triangle that that slope is located on.
And it points me in the direction of the downward slope on this surface. Now, if I go ahead and I go back into annotation and I go to surface labels and I go to slope and I hit ENTER and I select full development and click okay. And this time I select a two-point slope label.
What Civil 3D is going to ask me to do is select a first point and then it's going to ask me to select a second point. And so now what Civil 3D is doing is instead of this slope label, where it is a single point giving me the slope of the triangulation surface at that specific point, this one is giving me a slope from this point to this point. So it's basically finding out what the elevation on the surface is here and what the elevation on the surface is here and then giving me the slope between those two points.
So what I can do is I can move this one here anywhere and you can see as it starts to update, it updates the direction. Whereas this one, it doesn't matter which direction I go, it's automatically updating the slope in whatever direction between the two points. So these are two important different kinds of labels that you can use to dictate slopes and give yourself information on your surfaces, but just know that there are different actions.
So this one picks out what the triangle it is that it's based inside of and shows you the direction of the slope. This one is calculating a slope between two points. So I'm going to go ahead and save this drawing and then I'll meet you in the next video and we'll start talking about contour labels.
