Setting Up Surface Style for Slope Analysis in Civil Engineering

Configuring Surface Style for Slope Analysis in Civil Engineering Software

Setting up surface styles is a key part of preparing to display analyses. This article focuses on how to navigate the tool space window, create a new surface style, select specifications, and ensure visibility for the analysis display.

Key Insight

  • The article explains how to navigate to the tool space window, find the full development surface, and select Surface Properties to set up a new surface style.
  • Details are given on how to create a new surface style, named 'Slope Analysis', and how to specify the scheme, groupings, range precision, display type, and legend style.
  • Instructions are also provided on how to ensure the analysis will be displayed when ready, including how to turn on the display for different types of analysis such as User Contour, Direction Analysis, Elevation Analysis, Slope Arrows, or Watersheds.

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.

In this video, we're going to go ahead and set up our surface style so that we are ready to display our analyses when we actually run our first analysis. So in order to do that, what I'm going to go ahead and do is navigate over to my tool space window on the Processor Tab, go to my surfaces, find my full development surface, and right-click and select Surface Properties.

So from here, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go to our Surface Style, and I'm going to go ahead and drop down and create new. So from here, I'm going to go to my Information Tab. I'm going to type in a new name of Slope Analysis because we're going to be working with slope analyses in the next video.

So from here, I'm going to go ahead and leave Borders, Contours, Grids, Points, and Triangles, and Watersheds the same. And I'm going to go to my Analysis Tab and expand out my Slopes Analysis drop-down menu. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and change my Scheme to Rainbow.

Then you have the options of how are you going to group your ranges. And so you have the options for Quantile, Equal Interval, or Standard Deviation. This is just how the ranges are going to be grouped together or how it's going to be split up.

You can define your own groupings later. We're going to go ahead and leave it as Quantile, and I'm going to leave my ranges as 8. Then from here, you have your Range Precision. You can make it as imprecise or as precise as you want it to be.

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I'm going to go ahead and leave it at this Range Precision. Then you have your Display Type. So the analysis is going to either be 2D solids, 3D faces, hatched solids, or meshes.

I'm going to go ahead and leave my Display Setting as a 2D solid. The next item that you have is your Legend Style. When you create a legend, which is basically a table like we created for our parcels here, but describes what the different ranges are and what colors they are, this is how it's going to be displayed using the Legend Style.

It's almost the same thing as a table style. So I'm going to go ahead and leave it as Slope, and we'll talk about that Slope Legend Style in another video. So from there, we have our Slope Display Mode.

So you can use Surface Elevations, Flatten Elevations, or Exaggerate Elevations. I always like to use Surface Elevations. So I'm going to go ahead and leave this as Use Surface Elevations.

Then I'm going to navigate to my Display tab, and I have to make sure that I turn on the analysis to be displayed when I'm ready to view it. So what I have to go ahead and do is in this Display tab, I have to navigate down under Plan View and find Slopes. And there, I have to turn it on so that it will be displayed when we run our analysis.

So from here, what we're going to go ahead and do is explain the other analyses that are available to you to turn on. So in here, if you have a User Contour, all you have to do is turn it on. If you have a Direction Analysis, turn it on.

Elevation Analysis, turn it on. Slope Arrows or Watersheds, you just have to turn them on, and then they will display once you run that analysis. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and click Apply and click OK.

We now have our Slope Analysis default style set in. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure we're still selecting Slope Analysis because when we go to Analysis tab and we start that analysis, when we click this down arrow, the scheme that we chose in this Surface Style is going to populate down in this Range Details information. So I'm going to go ahead and end this video, and I'll meet you in the next video, and we'll start our analysis.

photo of Michael Kinnear

Michael Kinnear

Civil 3D Instructor

Mike is a Civil Engineer and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He brings a wealth of experience working on transportation engineering and site development projects that involve working with Civil 3D, AutoCAD, and MicroStation. Mike is an avid hiker and enjoys spending time with his family in the local Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Civil 3D Professional
  • Civil 3D
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