Explore the fundamentals of creating pipe networks in Civil 3D, including an understanding of the two different types of pipe networks: gravity fed and pressure networks. Learn how to utilize the parts catalog to organize different components of a pipe network, and how to direct Civil 3D to look at a specific folder for the structures and pipes needed for the network design.
Key Insights:
- In Civil 3D, there are two main types of pipe networks to understand: gravity fed networks (simply referred to as pipe networks) and pressure networks.
- One key aspect of pipe network design is the use of a parts catalog, which organizes all the different components of a pipe network. This allows designers to reference these parts in their drawings without loading all of them simultaneously.
- While Civil 3D provides a standard catalog, the software allows users to direct it to custom catalogs located in specific folders. This is useful for designers needing to meet specific requirements from different municipalities or government agencies.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
All right, so now that we've got this desilting basin created, we want to go ahead and start creating some pipe networks to drain our sites into the desilting basin. So before we can get into creating any kind of pipe networks, what we need to understand inside of Civil 3D is that there are two different kinds of pipe networks that we're going to be dealing with. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about gravity pipes or gravity-fed networks.
Civil 3D denotes these as pipe networks. They don't specify that they're gravity-fed, but when you're dealing with pipe networks inside Civil 3D, know that you're dealing with gravity-fed drainage networks or sewer networks. When we're dealing with pressure networks, Civil 3D denotes them as pressure networks.
If we go ahead and look in the Prospector tab, you're going to see in here pipe networks and pressure networks. That's what we're talking about. Pipe networks are gravity-fed; pressure networks are, in fact, pressure networks.
So the important component about pipe networks that we're going to be dealing with first is this concept of a parts catalog. Civil 3D has a way to organize all of the different pieces and parts of a pipe network into a catalog where we can reference those pieces into our drawing without having to have all of them loaded into our drawing at the same time. To set a parts catalog, we go up to our Home tab of our ribbon bar and drop down this Create Design button down here at the bottom. Inside of here, there's some additional functionality that we don't always use, but Civil 3D makes it available to us in the ribbon bar.
Inside of this ribbon bar, you're going to notice over on the right-hand side we have options for creating a network part list, creating a full parts list, and then the third option we have over here is Set Pipe Network Catalog. When we select Set Pipe Network Catalog, what we're doing is directing Civil 3D to look to a certain folder, and then once it looks inside that folder, it's going to look to a catalog for the pipes or the structures that we're going to be dealing with inside of our pipe networks. There are different municipalities or different government agencies like departments of transportation or something like that that have different parts networks and parts catalogs produced for designers to use.
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Since we are doing this course using it across a broad spectrum of users, we're going to go ahead and use the out-of-the-box pipe network catalogs. We're going to stay with our catalog folder as it's described, but if you wanted to change this, all you would have to do is click on this folder icon here. Civil 3D is going to open up a finder window.
We're going to go to any folder where we would save off a special catalog that we wanted to use and select that folder. Here we've selected our folder from our Program Files: C3D 2021 > ENU > Pipe Catalog. Inside of this Pipe Catalog folder are all of the different catalogs associated with pressure networks and networks. We can leave it here, and if you wanted to add additional catalogs to this folder, you could do that as well.
So say you downloaded a California DOT pipe network catalog—you could save that folder here, and once it's saved here, it would show up down here in this Pipe Catalog or Structure Catalog list. You could drop down and select either Metric Pipe, US Imperial Pipe, or if you had a different catalog that showed up for a Department of Transportation or something like that, that would show up in this dropdown list. Same thing here with Structure Catalog—you have all of these different structure catalogs based on the folders that are inside of our catalog folder.
I'm not going to change any of this information, but it's for you to change if, in the future, you are doing design work and need to specify a certain Pipe Network Catalog. From here, I'm going to go ahead and click OK. I am going to change the name of the file that we're working in right now.
I'm going to say do a Save As, and we're going to go ahead and save this as CIV203_Pipe because we're going to start dealing with pipe networks. So I'm going to go ahead and File > Save As. I'm going to change CIV203_AdvancedGrading to Pipe.
I'm going to do a Save, and I'm going to go ahead and meet you in the next video.
