CAD-1 Presents - Grading with Feature Lines in Civil 3D

in with an only mode alright thank you everyone for joining us today for grading with future lines my name is laurent wada as you can see all things marketing today I'm joined with Bryan Halley our resident PE or technical specialist today they'll be walking us through this today's webinar before we do get started I do want to make sure that everyone can hear us so as you can see on your right hand side your task pane there will be a questions dialog box please feel free to enter your questions throughout the entire presentation we will stop the presentation and answer them accordingly or if it is something you need to take offline we will inform you that we'll take it offline and answer you at a later time so feel free to answer as many questions as you want and again we'll a lot we'll get to them as soon as we can for those of you that are students or of universities or colleges or whatnot we have been approved by the State Education Board so feel free to contact us if you have any information about that taking some of our classes to further your education and Norris I do believe that we are the only reseller in the area that is approved Haley that is correct we are the Olin as far as we know in the whole entire United States excellent um yeah and before we move on one thing I do want to point out and we always like to point this out on all of our webinars anytime we talk with our customers is February in February if your software is not on subscription you will not be able to upgrade it to the newer version so if you have old versions of old licenses sitting around that eventually you want to be able to use and put up them on the current version if they're not on subscription come February 2015 you will not be able to do that you'll lose all value that the those licenses hold so that's something you definitely want to think about as we go forward and you know what I'm not showing my screen yet it would help if I was actually showing my screen here that's looking over Lawrence the screen I'm like how come his is different than mine so as we were mentioned earlier this is the dialog box that you would answer questions information about the student industry toolkit yep and then these are a list of upcoming classes we do our first class coming up here Kennedy is all the way to civil 3d styles class a lot of these classes are the extensions of one day civil 3d classmen fundamentalism surveys and infrastructures and Kennedy is are a little bit longer through to form a classes we have these offer these classes just about every month they fill up the citizen sleaze so definitely get a chance to take some time off to get a class right now it's a great time to do so if they say there's two best times to take a class to get training when you have the time and when you have the money and in this industry those two times never seemed to coincide so yeah and if you want to point out that those bottom four those one day classes this is kind of our answer to the advanced civil aspect we have an advanced civil activist is well John wants to learn about his stuff and Joe wants to learn about his stuff and Sally wants to learn about her stuff and you don't want to have to sit through all everybody else's stuff that they want to learn so that's why we've kind of created these one-day classes all right well with that said I'll give Brian the floor bride all right thanks Lawrence so today we're going to be talking about braiding with feature lights now prior to talking about grating with feature lines we really need to talk about sites so a site in civil 3d right so everybody knows what a site is you go out and you do site grading and site business and all that stuff so what is a site in civil 3d so that that's going to be the first thing we need to talk about and in my opinion this is probably the most important thing you'll learn about today if you don't pay it attention to the rest of the webinar pay attention while I'm talking about sites the next thing we're going to talk about is how to go about creating feature lines so I want to create some future lines and how do I go about doing that what are some techniques to create future lines we're going to take those feature lines and add them to a surface now when you're using future lines for grading you're going to be adding them to a surfaces brake lines I'm not going to be talking about what a brake line is but what I am going to do is I'm going to talk about some of the settings that you can apply as you're adding feature lines to a surfaces brake lines and then we need to get into editing feature lines and I know some some folks think this is kind of a backwards way of doing it you add the feature lines to the surface and then you edit them but remember this is civil 3d we've got a whole new way of doing things in civil 3d so how about we get to it so like I said before the first thing I want to talk about is the concept of the site so a site alright sites every everybody knows what a side is but in civil 3d I want you guys take this away a site is not a site if you haven't actually investigated what a civil 3d site is whatever you think a site is in civil 3d that that's not what it is it's not so what do most people that are doing civil engineering think of when they hear the term site oh they think of something like this everything within the property boundary is in my site we send the surveyors out to do a site visit the are to do a site survey the engineers go do a site visit this particular commercial project is going to be creating a whole bunch of extra traffic and we need to go improve that intersection over there what's that well that's an off site improvement so when we think as engineers about sites we think location where is the project in civil3d a site has absolutely nothing to do with location this is not a site in civil 3d so what on earth is a site in civil 3d well technically a site is a topology whoo there's a good word for you a topology what on earth is a topology well I looked it up on Google just like everybody does for everything right and as you can see here a topology is the study of geometric properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change in your wive's let's look at that deck second one the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged so how are these things interrelated so basically what a site is it's a bunch of things that interrelate with those other things so what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of walk you through my process of learning what aside it's nice let me shift over to civil 3d here oh like this isn't going to be all PowerPoint I promise all right so as I was learning civil 3d I had the misconception of what a site is and well I got a project and I wanted to start learning civil 3d so I decided to use this project and first thing I had to do is create in the light so I just come in here and I'm going to create an alignment that represents my roads oh it's going to ask me for site all right so back then alignments had to be in the site they don't know but so I created a site and I give it the name of the project all right because everything within the limits is going to be a part of this site right so I come through here and I create my alignment let me go ahead and create them line it real quick so like that all right and there's my alignment well my project has more than one road so let me go create another line it's in the same location so it must be in the same site all right so I'm gonna give it to put it in the same site here in another alignment and there's my roads and what on earth is that thing where did that come from well yeah that's a parcel so if I grab to put that label you can see it's a parcel why is there a parcel there I didn't create any parcels all I did was create two alliance well real quick parcels in civil3d cannot be created they cannot be edited and they cannot be deleted alright so if I grab this parcel I hit delete it's not going to be deleted if I explode it I'll get extra lines in the drawing but the parcel is going to remain a parcel is a defined object that is defined when parcel segments enclose an area you can edit parcel segments to leak parcel segments to great personal segments and those things are used to define my person now if I don't want so when I put these alignments in a site they act as parcel segments and so we get this interaction so this is a quick demonstration let me go ahead and do this again all right let me go ahead and create another new drawing here real quick in this time I'm going to draw a couple create a couple future lines and I'm just going to use polylines to start off with I'm going to take these polylines and I'm going to make them into future lengths so I'll create the future lines from objects now another thing I want you to take away from this is you should never under any circumstances ever use site one why well that's because it's the default site so it's like drawing a layer 0 alright you should never in your drawing or on layer 0 why because then you don't know what that stuff is alright so in this example I'm going to use site 1 okay I take that back the only time you should ever use site one is when you're demonstrating why you should never you say all right so I'm going to put it in site 1 I'm going to take this future line I'm going to raise it up in the air just a wee little bit and I'll go ahead and split my view here so over here on the Left I've got my plan view over here on the right I'll pull this off into a 3d view so you can see these two feature lines are definitely at different elevations here if I take this feature line and I grip that at it so it crosses over this other feature line as soon as I'm done editing you'll see that happen so what's happening here well these two feature lines are in the same site so anytime objects within the sigh intersect each other they have to have the same elevation these two future lines are in the same site where they cross they have to have the same elevation now why did the bottom one jump up to the top one well this is because the top one was the last one edited so if I take this bottom one and I grab edit it so it goes smack right smack back down on itself you'll see the top one jumps down to the bottom one so is this a good thing or is this a bad thing well if you don't know this is happening this this could be really really bad but if you know this happens this is a very powerful tool here so when I have to feature lines that I'm going to be adding to the same surface I want them to have the same elevations where they cross each other because that's when the limitations of a surface and again last one edited when's the battle okay so Sally the engineer has gone through here and she's thrown all the grading and now Steve the surveyor he's come in and started doing some parcel work so he's going to come in here and he's just going to I don't know draw a nice little rectangle in here that represents the easement that he's trying to define and he'll double take that line work and make it into a parcel site so she was great parcel from objects they'll grab the polyline and it's going to ask me what site should it go into oh I don't know I'm just going to use site one why not it's the default and as you can see over there on the right when the parcel segments intersect the feature lines they always going to have the same elevation because they're in the same site over here in the plan view I don't see any of that so the surveyor came in it froze the surface froze all the future lines because he didn't care about that sort of stuff and it advertently just messed up all of Sally's grade now surveyor Steve is going to come in here and put some labels in here so I'm just going to add some labels to this parcel so choose parcel multiple segments alright go ahead and add that in so I'll just just varying distances over here and as you can see because this was a rectangle and I got a beautiful 96.7 8 feet as you can see at the top I got 96.7 8 feet as well I'd over here on the right I got 500 12.5 3 feet and over here on the Left I've got 400 what on earth is going on here well this parcel segments are interacting with the future lines so these labels are only showing me the distance from here to here and likewise from here to here so as I take this label and I actually move it across to the other side this future line this is pretty crazy stuff going on here you can actually watch that distance value change as it crosses that area so what should I have done well I shouldn't have put these things in the same site oh and by the way getting the same concept rolls past one edited when how's that for a parcel and that beautiful I love that so what should I have done well I shouldn't have put these things in the same topology time I'm going to take these two feature lines here and I'm simply going to move them to a different site so I'll choose move to site now whenever you're dealing with sites you always want to make sure you use decent name things so site 1 means nothing to me so I'm going to call this one North West Lots great so these are the feature lines are going to be used to grade the northwest Lots or something along those lines so that when Steve's the surveyor seed comes in and sees a site called North West Lots grading knows not to use that for his parcel work so I'll select ok here I'm going to move that into those Lots and now these feature lines are no longer interacting with the parcel segments there's good interacting with each other because they are still in the same site but they no longer interact with the parcel so it's very very important that you understand how sites work especially when we're dealing with future lines cannot stress that enough all right so so that's the concept of sites so let me switch back over here to my power all right so that's the site those are typologies if you have any questions on this feel free day to post them up I got a lot to cover hopefully I'll be able to get your questions but this is going to be a tough one today let's see so the next thing I want to talk about is creating feature lines so I know feature lines work great and love that interaction between future lines so if I change that feature line this feature line changes too how do we go about creating these things well there's a couple of different methods that we can use to create them first of all you can just draw it so I had to go and use the command crate feature length and just go through and draw another thing you can do is you can take line work that's already in the drawing and even line with this X wrapped in and create feature lines from those objects now when do you want to use which one if you just want to if you have simple line work if your the feature line is going to be pretty simple and you pretty much know the elevations they need to be act up you can just draw it I'm personally not a big fan of the just draw the method unless the really simple feature lines like I want to feature line that goes from here to here and that's it if you got a complex objects or you don't know what the elevations need to be yet you know you're going to have to come back and edit those anyways that's when I typically use the grade from objects and personally even with the really simple feature lines I prefer the create from objects it's just kind of it seems to work better for me there's nothing wrong with the just draw them way of doing it it's you know different people like different things all right so let's see a couple of ways of creating future lines so let me switch back over here to civil 3d I'll go ahead and load out of the strong alright so I've got some line work in here and I want to create feature lines so I'm just going to use the create feature line command first I'm eventually going to take these lines and make them into future lines but I'm going to start off just drawing it's on the Home tab again whenever you want to create something in civil three d go home so on the home tab feature lines I'm going to use the create feature line command it's going to ask me what site do you want to put this in so again you have to make sure you've got a good understanding of sites so I'm going to create a new site here and I'll call this one I'm just going to use this one as delete me because I don't want anybody actually using X I know I'm going to delete it later because I'm just coming in here doing some testing all right eat your lines the name of your feature line is optional you don't have to give it a name you also don't have to give it a style if you don't give a feature line of style the display of it behaves exactly the same as a line all right what layer do you want to go on and if you're converting line work you can have some conversion options down here we're not converting anything so these are all grayed out so I'll select ok and it's going to ask me to pick my first point so I select my first point and now it's going to ask me for the elevation of it this is why I'm not a big fan of this command because most of the time as I'm creating feature lines I don't know what the elevations need to be yet but if I knew what it was then I can just type in it so I'm going to give it an elevation of say 100 now it's going to ask me for the next point all right so let's pick the next point and now it's going to ask me for the slope so I want to go from there up two percent to this location down in three two one to that location or I've got many different command line options so I can do it difference I could go to a specific elevation I get the elevation from surface or if I wanted to kind of do a constant slope between a whole bunch of points I can use a transition so I'm just going to say hey I'm going to go at two percent SciTech two and did something on Hanuma try this game again all right so create my future lines get my first point elevation of 100 I pick my next point I'm going to do a grade of two sent ah I've got layers turned off that's what's going on here bit my next points and I want to go down at say ten percent let me go ahead and turn some layers on here there it is there's my other one that I created earlier and now if I just do let's say for example an ID at the end here you can see this endpoint is an elevation one hundred all right this one is at an elevation of 105 point two zero nine six I didn't have to calculate that I just knew this going up at two percent and then likewise down here it's going to be at an elevation of 80 actually let me change my layer stay here quick so I should have been originally alright so I get this line work in here I've already got the lines that I didn't want to make into future lines um but what can we create feature lines from well let's find out so let's use future lines great future line from objects down here is showing me all the different things that I can create feature lines from I can do it from lines arcs polylines or 3d polylines so a question came in earlier serve a future line to a future line there is no option to create a feature line from a survey feature typically survey features are static feature lines are geared more towards the dynamic rating type of a thing so you can still use survey features as brake lines on a surface but there's no way to convert them to future lines typically we don't do that the only way that I know of to do that would be to take the future line explode it make it a good 3d polyline and then convert that back to and then into a feature line all right so I'm gonna come in here I'm a grandma future I say I got this male line out here this represents my ride away this is where I'm tying in to the grading that's already out there so I'm going to put it in the correct side so I've got one your overall grading already I can give it a name I'm personally not a big fan of naming feature lines I don't name polylines either nothing wrong with naming feature lines in my opinion is just one more thing you have to manage all right so I'm just not going to name it style yeah I'm gonna give a style I'm going to use this right away style that I created earlier I'm going to erase the existing entities and I'm going to assign elevations because I don't want that polyline left over the only reason I created a polyline with great future line so I'll select okay it's then going to ask me what elevation you want to assign to this so I have a couple of options I can assign an elevation so I know this needs to be level at this elevation I can simply do that I can do it from a surface so in this case I want to tie into the roadway grading so I'm going to use the corridor surface and then there's an option here to insert intermediate grade breakpoints basically well if you toggle this on your feature line is going to follow it exactly along your surface if you leave this unchecked is simply going to take the vertices and project them up to the surface so for this example I'm gonna go ahead and toggle that on just so we can see what's going to happen and now I have a future line here and you can see all those little circular grips I've got a whole bunch of them right here that's where this future line cross the Triangle of the original surface that we're getting the elevations all right let me repeat the process here I'll do this for the lot lines now I'll just grab all my lot lines again beat your line create future lines from objects I'm going to put it in the same side because of the elevation of my right away changes I want my lot lines to change give them a different style I'll use a lot line style Here I am going to erase the existing entities and I am going to assign elevations this time I'm not going to toggle on the insert intermediate grade break points I did this feature line out here is at the correct elevation it's tying into the roadway design but I'm just going to assign an elevation from that surface just to get these ones up in the vicinity of the project so I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that accept okay and now these red lines here are feature lines and then why I would do it with anything else that I needs to be featuring so those are the two methods that we have for creating feature lines all right how many more questions yet once no this time but again just type in on the right hand that task pane in your questions and we will I answer extra one just came in Oh what does the future line style do for you that's a good question so what is the feature line style do um it just like any other styling civil3d it controls how the object works all right so I created a style for this so if you notice this particular object is on the layer C - topo - feet - grab all right so it's kind of the default layer that civil3d users here right so that's the layer then it's on if you notice it's not displaying according to that layer instead it's displaying according to the style now let me go ahead and do that here for these lines and what I'll do up ahead and future lines create future lines from objects and what I'm going to do here it is I'm going to uncheck the style I'll select okay um yeah that's good so now these feature lines are no longer being displayed according to the style they're just being displayed just like any polyline would so if I grab this it's on this layer see total feet grading if I change the color of this layer for example to a nice orange you'll see see the future lines change as well they behave just like lines um there is some other things you can do with feature lines the styles so in that other example I have where the to feature lines crossed you can actually control which one wins based off of the style now in my opinion you should never do that anytime you have feature lines cross you should always put a vertex there another question came in when you use future line Styles doesn't it give some kind of priority on which future line wins yeah and that that's what I was just talking about to tell you you type that in just as I was about it um as I said before I in my opinion it should not ever come into play because you should always have vertices whatever your future lines cross so if you notice any time just grab these here anytime these feature lines cross another feature line you'll see I've put vertices here this makes life so much easier and there's no need to be raped sorry Joey you were typing it you hit probably hit enter just as I started talking about it questions are good don't don't be sorry it's sorry for being sorry nice Joe alright so let's get back to the PowerPoint all right so now that we've got the feature lines created what we're going to do is we're going to take the feature lines and right now I'm going to add them to a surface is great lines like I said I'm not going to get into what brake lines do I'm going to talk more about some of the settings that we should see that you can apply as you're creating the brake as you're creating the brake lines now there's actually let me break up real quick a lot of people confuse brake lines and future lines civil3d does not have brake lines there are no brake lines in civil3d it doesn't matter what object you list you will never see an object listed as a brake line a brake line is a concept it is the surface is going to use an object as a brake line in its calculations but that object technically it's not a brake line it's still a feature line it's still a 3d polyline it's still up whatever that thing originally was it's just the surface is going to use it as a brake line when it does this triangulation so as words adding feature lines to the surface we would make sure we go through and set our settings correctly few settings that we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about weeding we're going to talk about supplementing and then we're going to talk about the famous and mid ordinate distance we've all seen it but but what does it do so let's talk about these three things excuse me so the first thing we have talked about is leading factors so waiting well that's pulling things out right so if I have a grapevine or a feature line that has a whole bunch of vertices in it well sometimes it really doesn't add a whole lot to my surface accuracy to put in all those extra pieces of data now typically you'll see weeding factors and supplementing factors when you're dealing with contour data but here's a little secret civil3d hang on a second okay all right sorry about that windows thing you know they always do that um civil3d treats contour data and brake line data exactly the same there is no difference in the calculations between brake lines and contours it treats contours as brake lines the only difference between adding an object to a surfaces a brake line versus as a contour is when you add it as a contour those factors those reading and supplementing factors aren't optional you have to put something in them the other difference is when you add contour data to the surface it automatically lets you put in your minimize flat areas options other than that they're treated exactly the same so you'll typically see these for contour data's but remember contours and brake lines well they're the same thing so weeding factors what do they do well I copied this right out of the help we have two different things that we can apply for a we affect we've got a length value and an angle value so the length basically what it does is it says okay I've got you know these three vertices here what's the link between them so if I've got if the l1 and l2 if the sum of those two lengths is greater than my weighting factor well then the data here is very sparse and nothing happens but if l1 + l2 is less than the weeding factor then the data is very dense in this point then becomes a candidate for removal the next thing is going to look at is the turned angle so this is the angle that we're looking at our turn date so by default the default setting here is 4 degrees so if this angle is greater than 4 degrees that the data is very angular and it's going to keep that point but if the angle is less than whatever the weeding factor is in this example 4 degrees then the data is very straight it has to meet both criteria it has to be very dense and it has to be very straight if it's dense and straight then this point really doesn't add a lot of information to the surface it just adds more math that has to calculate and so if both of these criteria are met so l1 + l2 is less than the distance value the angle here is less than at the angle B the equivalent line is going to be added to the surface well look like that so in this case that point probably wouldn't get weeded out because that's a pretty steep angle but then that's how the weighting factors work supplementing factors well they kind of do the opposite so when I'm supplementing the data it takes a look at the length of one a line segment so l1 in this case is l1 greater than the supplementing distance if it is is going to add additional vertices until the distance between the vertices are less than the supplementing distance and so you can see in this case the supplementing distance oops back up is this length here all right obviously it's less than the l1 length and so l1 is going to have additional vertices added to it is going to add in this case two vertices it doesn't add one at the supplementing distance so just make sure that the distance evenly spaced is less than the supplementing distance and then we get into my buddy the mid ordinate distance all I love the mid ordinate distance I always ask people in class what a mid ordinate distance is I get so many head scratches it's kind of funny you gotta think back like 10th grade geometry when we're talking to inordinate istic so what on earth is a mid ordinate distance well that's an inordinate distance all right so the mid ordinate distance is the distance between the midpoint of the curve and the midpoint of the chord so this is the mid organist and basically what this does is it allows us to take curved break line or curved feature lines and put them into a triangle surface the surface is made up of triangles triangles have straight lines you cannot have curves in a surface if I have curved data I have to approximate the curve a straight line segments and that's where the mid or dead distance comes into play so this is the mid ordinate distance of a curve now when we specify a bittorrent distance all right this is what's going to happen here so it draws a series of lines along the curve so that none of those lines have that same at mid or net discs the default civil3d is one foot so the distance here between midpoint of the line in the midpoint of curve is going to be one foot but if you notice there there's a slight little bit left over so it's going to take those points and it's going to redistribute it along there so that along that curve none of those mid ordinate distances are going to be greater than the mid orient distance that we specified another way to think of a mid ordinate distance is the distance so the mid ordinate distance is basically how far away from your surface the triangle do you want your data to be so my data is over here my surface is over here how far away can that be well let's think about this for a bit what are some things that we model that are close together that we might use feature lines or brake lines for curbing gutter what's the distance from the flow line of my gutter to the Bekaa curb of my gutter on the denver area it's about six inches for vertical curb and gutter whoo let's take this even a little bit further to make it two inches from flow line to face of curb so if my mid or no distance is set to one foot my surface might trying my flow line my trying to laid out behind back a curb so that's an inordinate distance now where would you use these well the let me back up to a here real quick all right so the weeding factors where would I use weeding factors we use weighting factors when you've got really dense data all right maybe I extracted a contour out of a surface and I want to add it to another surface as a brake line because that's where I'm going to be grading from or something like that net contour might have a ton of vertices on so I would read the snot out of it maybe I've got a very dense contour right next to a very sparse contour so I've got really dense data next to a really sparse state so I read the dense data and I'd supplement the sparse data to try to get more of a homogeneous density on the surface data and a bit ordinate distance well you always have the specimen orbit in that distance anytime you add data to a surface because if it has curves it has to know how to approximate that curve with straight line segments so let's see this here real quick let me go into my demo nice I've got feature lines here and I'm going to take these feature lines and I'm going to add them now to my surface as brake lines actually before I do that let me do this I've been doing this in class a bit let me draw this time do I have I'm trial arcs here little bit more about that mid ornate distance actually take yeah hold that thought I'll do that later so the mid ordinate distance is I said let me actually get distracted all right so let me talk a little bit more about a good value for the mid order in distance so as I was saying before if my mid ordinate distance is set to one foot and I have data that's two inches apart my flow line could triangulate behind the back curb right so we got to keep that in mind so how do I calculate what my mid ordinate distance needs to be let me let me get in here and start adding these so if you have feature lines and you want to add them to a surface all you have to do is grab the future lines right click and say hey I want to add these to a surface as brake lines it's also up here on the ribbon as well if you prefer to use the ribbon I kind of bounce back and forth between the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and grab them all so I've grabbed all my feature lines and then I'll choose to add two surfaces brake lines now in this case I don't have a surface yet that I want to add these to so I'll just go create a new surface real quick right I'll call this one proposed or whatever you want to call it select ok and now it brings up that dialog box that we're talking about the add feature lines alright and here's the weeding factors and here's the supplementing factors now if I was doing this for contours I wouldn't have the check boxes here those just beyond automatically in this case I'm gonna go ahead and leave those unchecked if you notice the mid orient distance is always on so what's a good value for the mid ordinate distance so what I'd like to do to calculate my mid ordinate distances I'll figure out what that smallest gap is flowline to top occur 2 inches I don't want my flow line to pass behind my top of curb so I'm going to take that mid orden that distance between those and I'll cut it in half all right so instead of 2 inches I'll use 1 inch so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to put in 1 1 inch C so 1/12 the PI square root of 3i it really doesn't matter I don't have to do that math conversion any time you're in a dialog box and you see a unit you can type in a different unit and yes I do know is point zero eight three three through three feet so I'm going to come in here and I'm simply going to type in one and I'm just going to hit tab to go to the next field and you see it does the conversion for me you know say for example it needs to be twenty nine millimeters so I can come in here and I can type twenty nine millimeters hit tab and again it converts it so one inch is point zero eight three three three three three V so my go to mid ordinate distance is a tenth of a foot that's what I like to use for my inordinate distance personally I would never go any bigger than a tenth of a foot I might go smaller than a tenth of a foot depending upon the day that I have but it's pretty rare that I model anything closer than in it select okay and it takes those feature lines and it adds them to my surfaces breakpoints so I've created the future lines I've now added them to my surfaces brake lines I haven't done any modeling of my future line tipped I mean done any elevation setting except for some basic stuff the feature lines right now are wrong that's okay this is what I'm going to do next I'm going to come in here and I'm gonna start editing the elevations so I've got the feature lines created they're added to the surface oh that's a good question Joe so Joe asks how can we permanently set the mid ordinate distance to be point 1 so if I come in here and I grab a feature line now and I choose add to surfaces great lines let me just create a quick surface here just to have something you'll see it remembers the last value I put in now in your template if you've not done this before you can set this so into your settings tab you right click on surface so it has alphabetical and at the future settings I'm sorry it's not feature setting command setting so if I expand out the command and add surface break lines that's the command we were just in I right-click on it I can edit the command settings and under leaves the data options there is my default mid ordinate distance and you can see because I changed it once it changed it here but if I go into a different commands such as add surface contours which can have a mid ordinate distance as well you can see that default mid or in distance here is set to 1 so that's where I could go change a good question show any more questions on break lines before we move on all right I'm moving on then so now we want to get into editing feature lines so we've got a whole ribbon dedicated to feature lines right these tools are great now just as a tip a lot of the tools I'm going to show you for editing feature lines will also edit break or appalling lines 3d polylines and 2d polylines as well so we have kind of two sections of the editing feature lines we have the Edit geometry so this is more getting into horizontal edit alright so I want to break a feature line I want to add a new point of intersection a pi/2 a break to a feature line rather I want to reverse the direction break it join and fill it it all sorts of fun stuff I can offset it as well we also have elevation tools so elevation tools and I can insert an elevation one so an elevation point is kind of like a vertex that you can't do a horizontal pen deck but we'll only do a vertical bet I can get elevations from a surface I can raise and lower it I can set slopes and my favorite of them all is the quick elevation at it I love this command I'm going to I'm going to be showing this one this this command is sweet if you're not familiar with a quick elevation edit I highly recommend that you check it out alright so I'm gonna go ahead and close this drawing get another drawing here that's already got future lines created I put some labels in here on the surface so that we can see some reactions here and I'm going to come in here and start editing elevations so basically what I want is at a 1 a 2 percent slope going from my backlot line to the street for the subdivision from the backlot line to the street from the backlot line to the street and that's what i need i need a minimum 2% slope and i need to make sure that it's flowing towards the street the whole lot is flowing towards the street so in this case i can't do something like this i can't put a high point here the high point needs to be back at the lot line so i've got this feature line as you can see right now it's sloping down towards the back lot well I needed to slope up towards the back lot that's why I need the high point to be so I'm going to take this feature line and I'm going to edit it now there's lots of ways of editing it you can go into your elevation editor this basically brings up your panorama shows you all the different vertices of it it works it's really good for setting things constant so I want it all to be the same elevation or something like that I typically don't use it it's nothing wrong with it it just doesn't work well for me so I'm not going to be using that one here instead I'm going to be using the quick elevation at it I love this tool really do I so I use quick elevation edit and now as you notice as I mouse around my project you can see it's give these little arrows on all and triangles and things and there we go so these labels are set up very uniquely so in this particular project I need a minimum 2% slope if you notice the red labels are red are less than 2% the green labels are 2 percent or greater this is a style that I created specifically for this data set so these don't come with the project if you want these email me I I'm willing to bet I can get it to you so I want this to go up to percent if you notice a little tooltip here depending upon which side of the air the line I'm on I'll get a positive or a negative slope all right so if I'm pointing on this side you can see right now this feature line is going down 0.7% that direction all right if I mouse on to this side you can see the little arrow flipped it's not going up 27% in this direction I want to change the elevation of that one the road elevation is fine so I get in here and make sure this arrow is pointing at the vertex I want to change and then I simply left-click it's now going to ask what elevation do you want or what grade do you want this to be well I want to speak to 2% so I type in 2 and enter and my surface changes love that all right what else changed well the labels change because their labeling the surface and you can see it's green now it's 2 percent or greater and the other thing that changed when I changed this feature line this feature line constant and so the elevation of this feature line changed as I change the elevation of this one because they're in the same site there in that same topology and then I can just continue to do this so I'm out I'm going to continue up 2% again and there we go let me let me do the same thing over here up 2% up 2% you can see how quickly I can start grading this lot out up 2% up 2% up 2% and I'm doing pretty good here now in this area you know I got this swell here this is basically going to be the backyard swale and what I want is I want a high point on here I want the water to flow around the house to the lot lines and then up the lot lines to the street so I need to locate the high point in here somewhere 2% up 2% of it's got to be in here somewhere so I'm going to use another tool I'm going to use the set slope or insert high low elevation point this is pretty cool so I'll run this command basically what it's going to do is it's going to calculate that high point for me all right so I select this point that's the start point this is where I want to grade to down here at this point down here right so I click there it's now going to ask me to grade ahead so starting here going that direction I'm going to go up two percent so I type 2 and then here going back on again I want to go up 2 percent so I type 2 and it calculates where that high point needs to be so as soon as I end the command you can see they all update now this label is showing 6% 0.6% because this label is actually showing the slope across here and if I get rid of that and then you know we label the surface real quick nope that's right I can add labels slope I'll do a two-point label go there there and there to there and you can see it is indeed a two percent slope all right so I had a question how do I get this the elevation and slope labels to show up they're just surface labels so these labels are simply surface labels yeah you actually show me just do it so you can add labels however you want to annotate add labels and I simply label the surface with the labels here alright so I used slope labels and I use spot elevation they're dynamic so when the surface changes the labels change you can label future lines as well but I've got some oddities with that so another question came in after that did that add HP command add a pie or eval point alright so the question is is that command that I just ran did it did its elevation did an insert of pie a point of intersection or didn't add in elevation point so if I grab this you can see it actually put in a little circular grip so it is indeed an elevation point it's not a pie if I grab that grid I can't move it off the feature line I can move it along with you tonight now at the I point to be over here instead no no no I want it to be over here I move it along the feature line but I can't move it off it if I edit this grip over here you'll see eight is still on the line let me go ahead and do that real quick there we go and so those are some of the tools that's a good question Jennifer can I convert an elevation point to a P I alright so for whatever reason this isn't a very good example of where I would want to do that but let's say you have reason to do it I'm not saying there is no reason I just can't think of one off the top my head but I'm sure there are reasons to that I actually want to may be able to make that into a bet I never actually tried it before there's no command that will do it but I have other tools I can insert a pie and I'm going to try this I've never tried it before so if my computer starts smoking or something like that that's why but I'm pretty sure this award I'm simply going to use the insert P I command and I'm going to snap to that elevation point so I'm just snapping endpoint that elevation point and that didn't work bummer I was really hoping that was going to work I don't know of any other way to do it great too bad I can't say that on air all right so just out of curiosity Jennifer well when would you see yourself using that I'm always learning trying to figure out new reasons people use the software so maybe type a sentence or two I would appreciate it personal if I needed to make that into a I there's other things that yeah so Chris mentions I could break the feature line and then join them so that might work so I can use the that's the trend is to join there's the break command okay so I'll go ahead and break it select an object to break and so I'll grab the feature line it's going to ask where I want to break it so I'm gonna use my first point turn that off right so I'll snap to the end point there oops okay I forgot to let me try it again and so do break grab the object I'm going to use the first point smacks me specify the first point so I snap to there and then I'll snap to the same point as my second point and now it's broken at the P I and then I can use another tool to join them back together and now it's there and by the way these are still a part of the surface which is cool yeah I agree it would be nice like I said it's not something I've ever honestly Jennifer in all the years I've been teaching this you're the first person that's asked about it so it's not something we typically see um but yeah I can definitely see why people would want to be able to use that all right um so there we go some of the other tools that we have I can create what's known as a stepped offset this this command is pretty cool I'm going to create stepped offset so I'll grab that feature lined up grab the surface again the surface is actually showing a border and the border is actually on top of the feature line I want to graph this happens all the time in CAD right what do we do we grab it we right-click display order send it back or type it or whatever you want um in this case I'm going to show you a cool little tip so I said mouse over actually I've got my highlighting turned off some reason but if I do a whole mouse over something I do a shift space I can then grab the thing that's underneath it just hold down the shift key tap the space key and it'll cycle you through all your different options I've got that highlighted turned off but I'm just going to draw it over to the back so it makes it easier crap so I want to create a new feature lines offset from here so I can use the stepped offset command I use this one a lot so I just run the stepped offset command it's going to ask me for a distance so let's say for example this was a top back of curb I want to create my curb and gutter now so I'm going to specify the offset distance I want offset 4 inches Frenchy's so that that's 4/12 of a foot aside to offset I want offset out this way and in the elevation difference oh it's going to be level so I'll put in zero all right and so you can see it creates the new future life for me I didn't want to do my my flow line so I'll do the same thing select an object to offset select the side oh but what's going to happen it's going to use that same offset distance so I'll just run a cancel out of that hit enter it repeat the command offset distance this case is going to be 212 2 inches select the object side elevation difference I'm going to go down half a foot there's my flow line and then I'll repeat the process one more time I'm gonna offset two feet to my edge of asphalt select the object side elevation is difference is going to be 2 inches or 212 and now I can take these new feature lines and add them to my surfaces break lines now in this case I have a border so I might have to do a little something here again I always always always set that mid or net distance to point 1 and let me go ahead and remove the border from my surface because things might get a little weird if I don't the boundary rather and if I take this into my object viewer now you see I got a nice little curb and gutter running around my project all right so that's all we had today do we have any final questions Lawrence no but if anyone does that we'll find a question please type it in on your task pane and if it's something we do need answer later we will be sure to go and reach out to you and with that said we do post most of our webinars on YouTube we have a YouTube channel it's kab one without the - webinars we have several postings up there right now so be sure to become a subscriber and you get notified whenever we do post our web-site webinars as we are right now we did have a question I come in about lineman's to feature lines lineman's to feature lines so there's no way to convert an alignment to a feature line but there is there are tools that you can run to create feature lines from an alignment so I on the just come back to civil 3d here real quick I'm not going to down on this one but I'll show you where it is so there is the create feature lines from alignment and if you have a profile for your alignment you can assign those elevations to the future line as you create it another question coming in a few questions here can steep offset lines be linked together as in curve if the top elevation changes it dynamically adjust the gutter abrade yeah so right now feature lines can't be linked to other feature lines unless you create a grading so if you use the grading tools at civil3d you can do that unfortunately in this example I just use feature lines if I change one I'd have to go change the other ones there are some pretty nice tools especially for an example curb and gutter there is the adjacent elevations by reference command so if I change one of those lines and I want to update the other ones this is the tool ever used to do that all right let's go ahead and call it a day it is our hour is up so thank you everybody for coming in and seeing us we are online so I should probably put the webinars laid up here as well that that would be a good thing for me to put up here so yeah so thank you everybody have a great afternoon thank you

Channel: CAD-1 Now Applied Software!

Views: 97,498

Keywords: CAD-1, Brian Hailey PE, AutoCAD Civil 3D Software, Webinar, Grading with Feature Lines in Civil 3D

Id: QK4dVvM9okw

Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 08 2014