Explore the steps to modify the object style for surfaces and display Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) lines in Civil 3D. This comprehensive guide will further help you to understand the importance of having triangles and points turned on for surface edits.
Key Insights
- To change the object style of a surface, navigate to the tool space, expand surfaces, find the desired surface, right-click, and select 'surface properties'. This will open a new window where you can create a new surface style under 'information'.
- Turning on major and minor contours as well as triangles and points in the 'display' section is crucial. This enables the user to perform various surface edits such as swapping edges, deleting, and adding points to a surface in Civil 3D.
- Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) lines, visible as aqua lines, create a three-dimensional face based on three lines. Once these are displayed, the user can start editing these lines for surface modification.
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In this video we're going to go ahead and change the object style for our surface, and we're going to start displaying some of the TIN lines that we've been talking about. Then we will save off the drawing, and in the next video we'll start talking about actually editing the surfaces. So to change the object style for our surface, the first thing we have to do is navigate over to the Tool Space, expand Surfaces, and then find our Full Development surface.
Right-click on Full Development surface and select Surface Properties. Once you're in the Surface Properties window for our Full Development surface, we're going to navigate down to our Surface Style. Just as we've done before when we edited our Contours 2' and 10' (Background), we're going to go ahead and click Create New. From here, we're going to navigate to Information, highlight New Surface Style, and change it to Edit Style.
I'm going to navigate to Borders. I'm not changing anything, not changing anything on Contours or Grids, Points, Triangles, Watersheds, or Analysis. The only thing I'm going to change is in Display. I'm going to go ahead and turn on Major and Minor contours as well as Triangles and Points.
In order to do edits for surfaces, you always have to have your Triangles and your Points turned on. It's a requirement of Civil 3D so that you can do swapping edges, deleting, and adding points to a surface. So I'm going to go ahead and click Apply and click OK.
I don't care too much about what the colors are, so I'm going to go ahead and click Apply and OK again. From here, we can see these aqua lines that are our TIN lines, or Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) lines. What these lines are doing is they're creating a three-dimensional face based on three lines.
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From here, now that we have these shown, we can start editing these lines. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to get this surface centered, I'm going to save, and then I'm going to meet you in the next video where we'll start editing the surface.
