Discover the process of creating a surface from feature lines in Civil 3D, an essential step when working on a development or grading branch alignment. Learn how to use feature lines as break lines for a surface, a common practice when aiming to achieve additional surface definitions, and an alternative to using grading groups.
Key Insights
- This article offers a step-by-step guide on how to create a surface from feature lines in Civil 3D, which is particularly useful when working on a development or grading on a branch alignment.
- It illustrates the importance of using feature lines as break lines for a surface. This is a common practice when trying to achieve additional surface definitions, and an alternative to the more advanced method of creating grading groups.
- The article walks through the process of selecting surfaces, choosing a name and style, and adding feature lines as break lines. It also delves into the nuances of group modifications and the significance of mid-ordinate distance in surface creation.
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Now that we've talked about side-to-side interaction, we've drawn all the feature lines that we're going to need for our development or our grading on our dev branch alignment. We're going to go ahead and take all these feature lines and we're going to create a surface from them.
You'll see in the next lesson that we have the options for creating grading groups when we get into advanced grading. When we are dealing with just feature lines, we're going to go ahead and use those feature lines as break lines for a surface. This is not the most nuanced way to do grading in Civil 3D, but I find myself doing this quite often when I'm trying to get additional surface definitions.
So this workflow that we're doing here, you might not use this workflow to do design grading inside of your day-to-day workflows, but it is a viable alternative to using the grading groups that we're going to talk about in our advanced grading lessons. So to create a surface from the feature lines that we've created, we're going to go ahead and go to surfaces. I'm going to expand out surfaces.
I'm going to select surface. I'm going to right click and click create surface. From here, I'm going to choose a name.
I'm going to call this dev branch grad for dev branch grading. I'm going to go ahead and choose a style. I'm going to choose the design topo style, and then I'm going to go ahead and click okay.
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So from here, I have my dev branch grad. I'm going to go ahead and expand this out. I'm going to expand out definitions, and I'm going to go to break lines.
I'm going to right click and select add, and I'm going to choose a description of dev branch grad because I'm going to go ahead and select all of these feature lines. Now, I could go through and I could do individual break line groups. I could choose pads and then just select the rectangles, and then I could choose retaining walls and then just select the retaining wall lines, and then I could choose daylight and just choose the daylight lines, but that's only important if you want to be able to make modifications to individual break line groups.
In this case, I don't have that desire, so I'm just going to go ahead and place them all in the same break line group. We've got the dev branch grad. I'm going to go ahead and use standard break lines.
We're going to go ahead and have no weeding factors and no supplementing factors, and I'm going to go ahead and, well, I'm going to go ahead and choose my mid-ordinate distance because we do have some curves in here, so I want to have a pretty good approximation. I'm going to go ahead and choose 0.05 as my mid-ordinate distance, and I'm going to go ahead and click okay. So from here, Civil 3D is now asking me to select my objects, so I'm going to go ahead and go through and select the feature lines that I want to add in.
I'm going to pick the three retraining wall lines, my daylight line, and then I'm going to go ahead and select all of my pad lines. So I'm picking all of these. Now that I've selected them all, I'm going to go ahead and zoom out.
I'm going to hit ENTER, and what Civil 3D has done is it has created this surface based on the pads that I've created. If I went and looked at this, we're probably having some triangulation issues right here. So what I'm going to go ahead and do after this video is we're going to go ahead and make some edits to this surface.
So I'm going to go ahead and view this surface by going to object viewer. I'm going to go ahead and go over to here, expand my object viewer, and what we're seeing here is I'm seeing some triangulation across this retaining wall face, but we're getting a pretty good definition along this edge. I am getting to see some of the pads that we've created.
We can see level pad grading, level pad grading. And if you notice, some of these spots are approximation of the wall is actually holding up our site rather than grading down. So that's pretty cool.
We're going to make some of these edits in the next video. I'm going to go ahead and close this. I'm going to back out, escape, and then I'm going to save.
