Explore the process of offsetting polylines, creating feature lines, and setting elevations in your drawings. This in-depth guide takes you step by step through each process, providing practical tips and insights to enhance your design skills.
Key Insights
- The article starts by detailing how to offset polylines by 15 feet inwards in a specific property drawing, a process that is simpler once the polylines are set up.
- It then walks through the creation of feature lines from objects and the importance of assigning unique names to them by using counters, especially when dealing with multiple entities.
- The final part of the article covers setting elevations for each of the feature lines, demonstrating how to raise or lower the entire elevation by specific increments to achieve the desired design.
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All right, so hopefully you're all done with that. We've drawn in the polylines for all of our property boundaries. So what we're going to go ahead and do now is we're going to offset those polylines 15 feet.
So I'm going to go ahead and set my offset command inwards 15 feet and I'm going to march myself around these parcels. So this should take significantly less time now that we have these polylines set up. So I'm continuing to just march around doing a 15 foot offset on every single parcel.
And then once we've done that, we're going to go ahead and set our elevations or create our feature lines. So let's go ahead and after we've done those offsets, we're going to go ahead and create these feature lines. We're going to do it from object.
So I'm going to go ahead and create feature lines from objects. And I am going to select all of the interior polylines that we have here, and I'm going to hit ENTER. So I'm going to change this to dev main.
So I don't have a dev main yet. So I'm going to create a new one. I'm going to create new.
I'm going to call the site dev main and I'm going to click OK. From here, I'm going to select a name. I am going to change it to lot.
And then I'm going to allow it to say next counter. Well, actually, because I don't want to have to deal with the individual numbers, I'm just going to choose lot. I'm going to go ahead and leave it a style gradient design to see total feet and erase existing entities.
So I'm not going to assign elevations just yet. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. Name counter must be used to generate unique names when converting multiple entities.
So I was incorrect in that. I do need a counter. So I'm going to go ahead and hit space and insert my next counter.
Click OK. Click OK. So I've now created all of my feature lines.
If I go here and right click on properties, I'm going to see it says lot one. That's incorrect. It's actually lot 11.
So in the break between these videos, I'm going to have to go ahead and change these names or we can just go ahead and accept them as they are. And since we didn't pay too much attention to what these feature lines were called related to the specific lot number, I think I'll go ahead fine with them being considered whatever lot number they end up being, even though it isn't specifically the lot that they're associated with. We've got these feature lines now.
I'm going to go ahead and save this drawing, and then we're going to start modifying some of these. I'm going to go ahead and select this feature line here, and I could go to elevation editor. You're going to see the elevation is set to zero.
I know that this contour line is 190. I know that this contour line is also 190. This is going upwards.
So two, four. So these parcels are going to want to be somewhere up above 190. We're going to go ahead and do something new here.
We're going to go ahead and set a value for a raised increment. I'm going to change this to 192, and then I'm going to hit up, and it will raise all of the elevations by that increment. So because they were at zero, I raised them by 192.
It set all points to 192. You have the option, if you wanted to, to change your increment to something smaller, and you could raise the whole thing by one foot or lower by a foot. But in our case, we wanted to bring it all to 192.
So I'm going to do the same thing for this parcel and this parcel. These are both going to be at 192. I think that I will make these ones here at 190.
So I'm going to go ahead and select these two, and I don't have an option for updating these. We have to do them individually. So there's no efficiency to be able to be had here.
We're going to go ahead and go elevation editor. I have this at 192. I'm going to go ahead and raise them by 192.
I'm going to take this one, elevation editor, raise it to 192, check it off. Now I'm going to go over to these three, elevation editor. I'm going to change my increment to 190, and I'm going to raise it to 190.
I'm going to check this off, select this feature line, elevation editor, raise it to 190, check it off, check this one off, elevation editor, raise it to 190, check it off. Now from here, this one is going to go to 192. So I'm going to go to elevation editor, change increment 192.
I'm going to raise this one up to 192. I'm going to go to this one here. Since we're crossing two here, I'm going to go ahead and change this one to 194.
I'm going to go to elevation editor. I'm going to change my increment to 194. I'm going to go ahead and raise it to 194 and check it off.
I'm going to change this one to 194 as well. So I'm going to go ahead and raise it up, check it off. I'm going to go to this one.
Since we're crossing four, I'm going to go ahead and change this to 196. So I'm going to go to elevation editor, modify my increment to 196 and raise this up, check it off. I'm going to do the same for this one here.
Elevation editor, raise to 196. I'm going to confirm that I changed this one and I did, which is 194, which means I have the remainders here. So I'm going to click on this one, elevation editor, raise it to 196, select this one, elevation editor, raise it to 196, check it off.
Select this one, elevation editor, raise it to 196, check it off. And then confirm that this one is in fact 194. Oh, I had that one set to 196, but we're okay.
And I want that to be 196 because this is the 194 contour. We're good here. So I am again going to save this and then I will meet you in the next video.