Explore the process of adding data to surfaces in Civil 3D, starting with modifying display styles and options for surfaces to customise the representation of your data. Understanding these settings can help in creating accurate and meaningful surface models.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of modifying surface properties in Civil 3D, including renaming the surface, setting descriptions, and choosing default styles and render materials. This provides a flexible way to customise how surfaces are displayed.
- There are several options to control the display of contours, including setting minor and major intervals and base elevations. The system can also automatically update the major interval based on the minor interval setting.
- Options for displaying points, triangles, and borders on surfaces are discussed, with the user having the ability to choose whether these components should be displayed or not. This granularity helps in creating a surface display that fits the user's specific needs.
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So before we can get to adding data to our surface, the first thing I want to talk about is we're going to talk about display styles for surfaces, and then we're going to talk about what data is actually available to add to the surface. So in this video, we're going to talk about display styles.
In the next video, we'll talk about what data can be added. And then the video after that, we'll be talking about, we'll be actually adding the data into our surface. So in order to talk about display styles for surfaces, what you have to do is go to the prospector tab, go to your surface dropdown, and then go to the surface that you've created.
From here, you're going to right click on surface, and you're going to select surface properties. When you select surface properties, the surface properties window pops up. So inside of the information tab, you have the name of your surface.
If you didn't choose a name for your surface, and you want to, you could now change this name. So I'm going to go ahead and change this name to full development. And I am going to go down and you can set a description, I'm going to erase out the description, text in there that said description.
And I'm going to move down to the next box, which is the default styles and the render material. So you have your surface style and your render material. So inside of here, this is where you're choosing how to display your surface.
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So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go in here, and we're going to modify an existing one. So I'm going to go ahead and choose 2 and 10 background. And then I'm going to drop down and select edit current selection.
So from the 2 and 10 background that we have here, I'm going to go to the information tab, I'm going to go to the name, which is contours 2 and 10 background, then we have a description of surface contours at 2 foot and 10 foot intervals in a background designation. This was created by Autodesk. And it was last modified by Autodesk.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to the borders. So borders for a surface are whether or not you have a display mode for 3D geometry, use surface elevation, flatten elevations or exaggerate elevations. I generally like to work with my surfaces using the actual elevation.
So I say use surface elevations, then you have border types, display exterior borders true display interior borders true, use a datum false, you can also set that to true, and then project grid to datum and datum elevations, I'm going to go ahead and leave it as false, then we have the options for contours. So you have contour ranges. So you group values by quantile, which number of ranges you want to group things in the range precision.
These are for certain display styles, when you do certain analyses, we'll get into those analyses later, then you have options for 3D geometry, contour display mode, use surface elevations, flatten or exaggerate, I always choose to use surface elevations, then you have a legend, if you create a legend for your surface display styles, this is information for how that that legend style is going to be, then you have your contour intervals. Now this is where we
have our settings for why we're actually selecting two and 10. We have our minor interval and our major interval and our base elevation.
So our base elevation is zero, our minor interval is two, and our major interval is 10. If I selected one, what you're going to notice civil 3D automatically updates the major interval is five. If I change this to 25, you'll notice that civil 3D modifies the major interval to 125.
So I'm going to go ahead and go to and we're going to have a 10 foot major interval. So moving on from here, you have the options for what you want your contours to look like if you had a depression. If you want to mark out a specific area and say there's a depression here, then you can choose that as true.
And then it will give you little tick marks in the areas where you have a depression in a surface, I usually select false. And then for contour smoothing, if you want to have additional vertices added to make your surface more smooth, then you would set it to true. So the one thing that you have to understand with these surfaces, the reason they're called 10 surfaces is they are 10 stands for triangular irregular network.
And so what civil 3D is doing is taking points and feature lines and objects that you've added in as data inside of your surface, and it's creating these triangular faces. And so depending on the different parameters that you set inside of your surface style and your, your definitions inside of your surface, then you will create smaller or larger triangles. And those smaller or larger triangles have more or less definition.
And so if you have large triangles over large areas, then maybe you want to smooth out your contours, you have lots of really jagged contours that are being displayed. And in order to smooth those contours, you're going to do things like add vertices or make your contours be displayed as spline curves. So I generally do not do contour smoothing.
I leave it as false, because I want to see how these triangular faces are interacting with each other and how you were seeing specific elevation lines being drawn across the face of those triangles. So moving on from there, I have grid. If you have a grid surface, these are the properties for your grid surface.
So you have your grid display mode, use surface elevations, you have primary grid, true and secondary grid true. If you're creating grids, what the intervals are going to be for the grids, what are the orientations of the grids, I don't generally deal with grids. So I'm going to leave these as is.
Moving on from there, we have our points information. So points display mode, if you're putting points onto a surface, how are those going to be displayed. So using surface elevations, you have the options of flattening exact elevations or exaggerated elevations, I, again, usually use the surface elevations, because I want things to be displayed as they are drawn in civil 3D.
And I don't want them to be flattened or exaggerated. So moving on from there, you have the point size, size, and absolute units, size relative to screen, and then use drawing scale. So for now, I'm going to leave it as size and absolute units, and my point units is three feet.
So then we have the points display how the points inside of the drawing are going to be displayed. So these points can either be points that we're placing on in the surface, or they're the points that the triangles are being drawn up and whether or not these triangles are these points are going to be displayed and how they're being displayed. We have data point symbols, derived point symbols and non destructive point symbols.
So these are all different kinds of points that are in our surface based on either data that we added derived points that are being kind of interpolated off of the data that we're giving civil 3D or non destructive point symbols. And that's a type of data that we add into a surface based on some of the definitions that we're going to go over in the future videos. So moving on from here, we have triangles, what are how are the triangles being displayed? Again, I always use the use surface elevation.
Then we have watersheds, watersheds are a specific type of analysis that you can do. We're not going to get into watersheds yet. We're going to go ahead and not go through these at this time.
Moving on, we have an analysis, there are different analyses that you can do for a surface. And so if you notice in our surface properties window here, there's a tab for analysis, the different types of analysis that you have in this tab show up and how they're going to be displayed here. So all of the different analyses you do, you're going to control how those analyses display when you turn them on in civil 3D based on these parameters here.
We have directions, elevation, slopes and slope arrows. Moving on from there, we have our display information, how the surface is going to display and plan model and section view. We have what can be displayed points, triangles and borders, just like we talked about here, borders, points and triangles.
Then we have our major and minor contours like we defined in our contours tab. Then we have user contours, user contours are a different type of analysis that you can do. Gridded is our grid tab here.
Directions is the directions of the slope. And that's an analysis and or a label that you can add. Then you have elevations, which is another analysis and or label you can add, you have slopes, which is an analysis, slope arrows, which is an analysis and watersheds, which is our watersheds tab here.
So in general, you're not going to turn most of these on or you're not going to have all of these on at the same time, you're going to have individual specific styles that turn on one or two at most. So for our current definition, which is contours two and 10, we want to make sure we're displaying our major and minor contours because we have our two foot minor contours and our 10 foot major contours. And then if you want to know where your surface ends, you want to make sure you are displaying your borders.
Now when we get into editing in the future, we're going to also want to be turning on points and triangles, but our current surface style is not an editing style. We want to go ahead and leave points and triangles off. We haven't done any analysis, so we're going to leave those off as well.
And then you have your summary tab, which like all other summary tabs, summarizes all the tabs prior, and you can expand out each one of these and modify the tabs from here. Or you can navigate back to a tab and do those tab modifications in the each individual tab. So from here, I'm going to go ahead and go to display because the thing that I want to change on my background display is that I prefer background colors to be grayed out.
So my minor contours, I'm going to go and display as 254. And my major contours, I'm going to go ahead and display as 252. So from there, I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay, and hit apply and hit okay.
And we have now modified our 2 in 10 background display style. Now again, like we talked about in the previous video, if you don't have any data in your surface, nothing's going to show up in your drawing yet. We're going to talk about data in the next video.
And then after that, we'll start adding this data into our surface.
