Discover how to use miscellaneous points creation tools in Civil 3D to create points in your drawing. Learn the intricate process of navigating the software, saving your file under different names, and exploring different creation methods for points.
Key Insights
- The article delves into using miscellaneous points creation tools in Civil 3D for creating points in drawings. Manual creation allows for a point to be placed anywhere, unrelated to any objects, with the software asking for a point description and a specified elevation.
- The author explains the concept of point descriptions, which can vary based on whether you're working in a survey department or an engineering department. The nomenclature often differs between physical features in the field and design elements.
- The article also touches upon different methods of creating points such as dividing an object into a specified number of segments and measuring an object. These methods allow users to create points at specific intervals or distances along a polyline at a defined offset, providing greater control and precision.
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In this video, we're going to go ahead and use our miscellaneous points creation tools to create some points in our drawing inside of Civil 3D. But before we do that, I want to save off this file that we were working on in the previous video as a different file name.
So to do that, I'm going to navigate up to the upper left corner in the file drop down, and I'm going to go ahead and select save as. I'm going to navigate to the working folder that I have my file saved in for this class, and then I'm going to go ahead and change the name of my drawing from Civ 201 BEG to Civ 201 COGO, because we're working with COGO points in this drawing. So I'm going to go ahead and select save, and then we're ready to start working.
So I'm going to navigate over to the right hand side where we have our text and our polylines, and we're going to go through some creation methods for creating points inside the Civil 3D window. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and go up to points. I'm going to select point creation tool, and we're going to walk through the different methods that are listed here.
Manual, along line and curve, divide object, and measure object. The reason why these ones are selected is because these are the workflows and methods for creating points that I find myself using most often inside my day-to-day work. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go up to the toolbar, we're going to drop down, and we're going to select manual first.
What manual does is it allows you to place a point anywhere in space not related to any objects or anything else. It's just wherever you click on the screen, Civil 3D is going to create a point and ask us some more information. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hover over this polyline and snap to the endpoint of this polyline and click to create a point.
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So once I've clicked, Civil 3D is going to ask me to enter a point description. Depending on if you're working in a survey department or an engineering department, the nomenclature for points may vary. So while survey departments may have common nomenclature for physical features in the field that they're bringing back into the office to put into Civil 3D, designers may use something different for things that they want to design or have placed out in the field.
So for mine, I'm going to have all of my descriptions associated to a common surveying term, which is a ground shot, and I'm going to call it GS for short. So I'm going to go ahead and say GS for ground shot, and I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER. Next, Civil 3D asks me to specify an elevation.
So because we are doing design point, we are going to specify a specific elevation that we want to have in our design. If this was something related to surveying, we may have an object inside of Civil 3D that we're referencing, and in that case, if we clicked on a point on an object that had a specific elevation, Civil 3D would return that elevation to us as a possible option. This polyline has an elevation of zero, and that's why zero is being auto-populated into this point here.
So I'm going to go ahead and type in 250 as my elevation example, and I'm going to hit ENTER. And what you'll see happen now is that we have a new point created at the endpoint of this polyline. So I'm going to create one more point so that you can see that it doesn't have to be created off of an object.
I will use a snap to have a specific location for you to click on, but it does not have to be associated with this polyline. You could click in space anywhere to create this point. I'm going to specify the center point for this curve here.
So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to hit shift, right click, and then I'm going to go ahead and select center. I'm going to hover over this curve here, and I'm going to click. And so Civil 3D then asks me to enter a point description.
Because my previous point description was GS, Civil 3D is auto-populating GS here so that you can, in effect, place multiple points with the same description and not have to keep typing in your description. So I'm going to go ahead and enter to select GS as my input elevation or my input description, and then I'm going to be asked to specify my elevation. I am again going to type in 250.
Now the reason why Civil 3D did not push 250 forward and selected zero is because I selected the center point of the polyline. That polyline has an elevation of zero, so it auto-populated zero as the elevation of the point that I'm creating. But I'm going to go ahead and force 250 as the elevation for that point.
And so now that we have created that point, I can go ahead and hit ENTER again to leave the command for the manual creation method. So moving forward from here, I'm going to drop down and I'm going to go ahead and select a long line curve. So I'm going to navigate down to a long line curve.
I'm going to select it and click. So Civil 3D is going to ask me to select an arc line, polyline, lot line, or feature line to create my point along. So I'm going to go ahead and select the polyline that is next to my long line curve text, and Civil 3D is going to say specify distance.
So I'm specifying a distance off of this endpoint here where I have this yellow X. So I'm going to go ahead and type in number of 15, and then it asks me to enter a point description. I am again, I'm going to go with GS for ground shot and hit ENTER. I'm going to specify an elevation, and this time I'm going to specify an elevation of 250 again.
So I'm going to hit ENTER, and what you'll notice is that it created a point 15 feet along this polyline from this endpoint here. If I was to specify another distance, I could specify something like 35. And if I select 35, and I choose GS as my point description, and I specify 250 as my elevation again, and I hit ENTER, you'll notice that another point was placed.
And if I went to check the distance on this, it would be 35 feet from this point here. So I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER to get out of that endpoint, and hit ENTER again to get out of the command. We're going to move on to divide object.
So I'm going to drop down and select divide object. Civil 3D is asking me to again, select an arc line, polyline, lot line, or feature line to create these points with. So I'm going to go
Ahead and divide this object by selecting that polyline, and it asks me to enter the number of segments that I want to create.
I'm going to go ahead and say I would like to create five segments. So I'm going to hit five, and then hit ENTER. Now Civil 3D is asking me to specify an offset.
So you can create these points on the line by specifying a zero offset, or you can specify an offset of positive for the right side, and negative for the left side. So this depends on your draw orientation. I know that I drew these polylines going from left to right.
So left is up, right is down. If I want my points to show up on the top of this line, I'm going to specify a negative number because it's going to be on the left of the line. So I'm going to go ahead and choose negative two, and I'm going to hit ENTER, and Civil 3D is asking me to enter a point description for these points that are going to be created.
I'm going to hit ENTER, and then I'm going to specify an elevation. Again, I'm going to choose 250. Now it's asking me to enter a point description again because I can change the point description of the next point that is created.
So I can go ahead and hit ENTER because I want to select GS again, and then I can specify an elevation of the next point, which I will choose to say 250. And what Civil 3D is doing is it's creating the points in segments along this polyline at the offset that I chose at the defined segment or divisions that I created, which was five. When we're done here, we'll have created the points to create those divisions of that object.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit GS again. I'm going to type 250 again. I'm going to hit ENTER for GS again.
I'm going to type 250 again. I'm going to hit ENTER for GS again. I'm going to hit 250 again, and then I'm going to accept GS again and type in 250 one more time.
And now we've completed this division of this object. So I'm going to go ahead and enter to get out of that command. And you'll notice here that I have one, two, three, four, five segments that I've created along this object.
So that is what the divide object does, is it divides an object into a number of segments that you've chosen at an equal distance. So you don't have to specify the distance that you would like. You just have to specify how many segments you would like to create.
So moving forward from there, we are going to go on to measure object. And Civil 3D again is going to ask me to select an arc line, polyline, lot line or feature line. I'm going to go ahead and select this polyline down here next to measure object.
And Civil 3D is asking me to specify a start station. So inside of Civil Design, a station is a distance along an object that you've created. So my object starts with a station of zero, and it ends with a specific station of however long this line is.
So I'm going to go ahead and select zero as my station so that I'm starting at the beginning of my object. Then I'm going to choose my ending station, and the Civil 3D auto populates the endpoint of my line as 166.602. If I want to go all the way to the endpoint, then I can go
All the way to the endpoint, or I can choose something shorter. So I'm going to go ahead and choose 166 as my end station for this measure object.
And then it asks me to specify an offset. Again, I realize that I drew the line going from left to right. So negative is going to be the top of that line, and positive is going to be the bottom of that line.
And so left of the line will be a negative, and right of the line will be a positive. So I'm going to go ahead and choose again a negative two, and I'm going to hit ENTER. And then it asks me to enter an interval.
So it asks me to how at what interval would I like to place a point between my start point at zero and my endpoint at 166. I don't want to have a whole bunch of points on this, so I'm going to go ahead and choose an interval of 40, and I'm going to hit ENTER. And so now I have to specify again my point description, which I'm going to choose as gs.
I'm going to hit ENTER. I'm going to specify a point elevation of 250, and hit ENTER. I'm going to enter a point description again of gs, and I'm going to do another elevation of 250.
I'm going to enter another description of gs, and I'm going to specify an elevation of 250. And so what I'm doing is I'm marching through from my start point to my endpoint, placing points every 40 feet. So next I'm going to do another gs.
I'm going to do another elevation of 250, and then I'm going to do another gs, and then I'm going to do another 250. And that is a starting point, and an ending point, and a point every 40 feet from the starting point. So a starting point, 40 feet, 40 feet, 40 feet, ending point.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER to get done with that, and then we are going to go ahead and be done with this file and this video for now. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and start talking about different point identities inside of the point creation toolbar.
