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.
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.
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 in the video after that, we'll actually be adding the data into our surface. So 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 the 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. I'm going to move down—you can set a description—and I'm going to erase out the description text in there that said description.
Then 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. Inside of here, this is where you're choosing how to display your surface.
So what we're going to do is we're going to go in here, and we're going to modify an existing one. I'm going to choose 2' and 10' (Background), and then I'm going to dropdown and select Edit Current Selection.
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.
I'm going to go ahead and go to the Borders. Borders for a surface determine 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 leave those as false. Then we have the options for Contours. You have contour ranges, so you group values by quantile, which number of ranges you want to group things in, and the range precision.
These are for certain display styles when you do specific 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 legend style is going to be. Then you have your contour intervals.
This is where we have our settings for why we're actually selecting 2' and 10'. We have our minor interval, our major interval, and our base elevation.
So our base elevation is zero, our minor interval is 2, and our major interval is 10. If I select 1, what you're going to notice is Civil 3D automatically updates the major interval to 5. If I change this to 25, you'll notice that Civil 3D modifies the major interval to 125.
I'm going to go ahead and choose 2, and we're going to have a 10-foot major interval. Moving on from here, you have the options for what you want your contours to look like if you have a depression. If you want to mark out a specific area and indicate there's a depression here, then you can choose that as true.
Then it will give you little tick marks in the areas where you have a depression in a surface. I usually select false. Then for contour smoothing, if you want to have additional vertices added to make your surface smoother, then you would set it to true. One thing you have to understand with these surfaces—the reason they're called TIN surfaces—is TIN stands for Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN).
So what Civil 3D is doing is taking points, feature lines, and objects that you've added as data into your surface, and it's creating these triangular faces. Depending on the different parameters that you set inside of your surface style and your definitions inside of your surface, you will create smaller or larger triangles. Those smaller or larger triangles have more or less definition.
If you have large triangles over large areas, then maybe you want to smooth out your contours because you have many jagged contours being displayed. To smooth those contours, you're going to do things like add vertices or display your contours as spline curves. I generally do not do contour smoothing.
I leave it as false because I want to see how these triangular faces interact with each other and how specific elevation lines are being drawn across the face of those triangles. Moving on from there, I have Grid. If you have a grid surface, these are the properties for your grid surface.
You have your grid display mode—use surface elevations; you have primary grid—true; and secondary grid—true. If you're creating grids, you set what the intervals are going to be for the grids and what the orientations of the grids will be. 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? Using surface elevations, you have the options of flattening exact elevations or exaggerated elevations. Again, I usually use surface elevations because I want things to be displayed as they are drawn in Civil 3D.
I don't want them to be flattened or exaggerated. So moving on from there, you have the point size, size in absolute units, size relative to screen, and then use drawing scale. For now, I'm going to leave it as size in absolute units, and my point units are three feet.
Then we have the points display—how the points inside of the drawing are going to be displayed. These points can either be points that we're placing onto the surface, or they're the points that the triangles are being drawn from. You decide whether or not these points are displayed and how they're displayed. We have data point symbols, derived point symbols, and non-destructive point symbols.
These are all different kinds of points that are in our surface based on either data that we've added, derived points that are interpolated from data that we're giving Civil 3D, or non-destructive point symbols. Non-destructive points are a type of data that we add into a surface based on definitions we'll go over in future videos. Moving on from here, we have triangles—how are the triangles being displayed? Again, I always use surface elevations.
Then we have watersheds. Watersheds are a specific type of analysis you can do. We're not going to get into watersheds yet. We're going to skip these for now.
Moving on, we have analysis. There are different analyses you can do for a surface. If you notice, in our Surface Properties window here, there's a tab for Analysis. The different types of analyses available in this tab show up, and how they're going to be displayed is controlled here. All of the analyses you do, you control how those analyses are displayed 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 in plan, model, and section views. We have what can be displayed: points, triangles, and borders, just like we talked about earlier: borders, points, and triangles.
Then we have our major and minor contours like we defined in our contours tab. Then we have user contours, which are a different type of analysis. Gridded corresponds to our grid tab here.
Directions refer to the directions of the slope—that's an analysis or a label you can add. Then you have elevations, another analysis or label you can add. You have slopes, which is an analysis; slope arrows, another analysis; and watersheds, corresponding to our watersheds tab here.
In general, you're not going to turn most of these on at once. You'll typically have individual specific styles that turn on one or two at most. For our current definition, which is Contours 2' 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 ten-foot major contours. Then, if you want to know where your surface ends, make sure you display your borders.
Now, when we get into editing in the future, we'll also want to turn on points and triangles, but our current surface style is not an editing style. We'll go ahead and leave points and triangles off. We haven't done any analysis yet, so we'll leave those off as well.
Then you have your Summary tab, which, like all other summary tabs, summarizes all the tabs prior. You can expand out each one of these and modify the tabs from here, or you can navigate back to an individual tab and make those tab modifications there. So from here, I'm going to go to Display because the thing 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 display as 254. And my major contours, I'm going to display as 252. From there, I'm going to click Apply and click OK, and click Apply and click OK.
We have now modified our 2' and 10' background display style. Now again, as we talked about in the previous video, if you don't have any data in your surface, nothing will show up in your drawing yet. We'll talk about data in the next video.
After that, we'll start adding this data into our surface.