Civil 3D Tips, Tricks & Best Practices - Making Contours Look Good

greetings from the civil inspiration galaxy tips for better looking surfaces and contours they're not as bad as you think they are I'm star-lord James and I'll be talking to you today about some sub issues on how to make your surfaces look better some setting some contours have some questions maybe you can answer maybe not do you know the right way to import contours and what I mean by the right way are what are the best settings are using the AutoCAD defaults do you really know what all those other little extra boxes and checkboxes and little minimum settings are can you really make civil 3d contours look good yes you can do you need to model every contour line to make them look good nope you do not but how can you smooth them if they don't come out right well there are plenty ways to smooth there's definitely two ways that I'll show you what other potential issues can come up sometimes when you're using the smoothing or some of the settings that you set before or using the defaults can cause issues how do you edit those settings or how do you change things at the end so if this looks like what you want to hear today then you're in the right spot let me talked about one of the first things mainly when you're importing the contour data inside of a surface there is some checkboxes and some other factors that dictate what civil3d is doing so this is Autodesk default this is some of the information that they just put in here notice they have filling in gaps and that's something you want to do they have swapping edges unchecked they have adding points to flat triangle edges and this is this to me is is a very bad one this one does a lot of weird stuff that I don't like what it does to the surface and then there's adding points to flat triangled edges one of the things you'll notice here on this adding points to flat angled edges is it as these little points automatically along a contour line like this dashed green line here so basically it's automatically adding these little points in there and those that piece of data kind of stays and hangs in there actually all of these kind of stay in there and hang let me let me show you what I'm talking about all right so I've just a simple drawing here and I some of my students call this the avocado drawing because they look like avocados basically there's just two polylines so if I can click on this guy and go to properties it's gonna be a polyline and they both have an elevation the top is at 10 and I think this is the bottom I think it just burns at 1900 so they're basins all right so let's just say I want to create my own surface here I'm just gonna start with a brand new one I'll leave the name because this isn't that part of the class let's go to surfaces go down to the definitions and this is what I'm talking about the settings so when you're inputting reporting the contours how are you importing them so I'm gonna go to add this should be set back to one so this is the auto Autodesk defaults there's this one right here I'm gonna hit OK and then I'm going to bring in these two lines and this is the contours that I get and notice the little extra pieces here if I go into this surface definitions this should be one thing I want to talk about in a minute if I go to the surface definitions you can see added contour data and it has this other one called minimize plot areas I want to talk to you in a minute about what this is and how to turn it off and how to avoid potential issues with that now let's talk about maybe I want them to look a little smoother this isn't going to be perfect but it at least gives you the idea I'm gonna right click again on the contours and this time I'm gonna make some changes the main change that I really want to do is the point on one why is that well the point of one will basically set along the mid ordinate distance which is along a curve so right now on the one foot it's basically putting a little AutoCAD surface point or vertex along the line that you drew or imported for your contour and it's doing it every one foot so here's a point and then it goes across to a one foot away and that makes the contours look pretty chunky these ones on the other hand if you do point a1 makes them look a lot smoother so let me just go into that one and let me change all talking about the other ones to the weeding factors it just means is going to take out information the Supplemental factors is just gonna add in the little downside about this one if you change this one then you have to basically this one has to be smaller than that one it's just the way that it is supplemental distance means that this is along straight lines the only time I usually change this is when I'm sending a surface to Revit and they need really tight topo lines so they can see the curbs and retaining walls and and that information but that's for a different class but basically I'm going to go ahead and make these changes here and then I'm gonna change some of the settings down here at the bottom so I had 0.25 and then 0.5 there are no straight lines on here they're all curved so it doesn't really matter fill contour gaps yes swapping an edge yes if you don't know what that is you should take one of our surface classes I definitely explain how to do swapping edges something you need to know how to do and then I'm going to turn on this adding point to flat triangle edges so that way it's not gonna add those little extra points there so if I hit OK and then select these two guys those contours are a lot better-looking right but as you can see from the triangulation being on it puts a lot more triangulation in there so you do need to be a little careful when you're doing this kind of information over very large projects maybe you can adjust that bin or net distance to be a bigger number you the point 1.0 one is the minimum so you can basically change it to whatever you want so like I said right here up side you got smoother contours better volume calx because you have a tighter triangulation and the downside is you have a lot more surface points so that can make the surface run a little a little more challenging for the surfaced alright let's talk about the next piece we're not talking about feature lines or break lines but I just want to show you that they have similar import options and that may learn a distance is really really really important here right here you can see these are the curve Returns which curve return would you rather have the one these two on the left or the two on the right this is probably what you're used to seeing and you're probably hated so this is again one of the better better options and you can see the supplemental factors here for the point five so if you look on this side you'll see the triangulation basically goes to the end of the the end of curb and then over here it goes to the end of curve and then it adds another vertex every or a triangulation every point five so that's just how you get it much tighter like I said you only really need to do that when you're using Revit alright so let's talk about smoothing options so how can you smooth a contour so maybe these aren't the contours you're looking for so this is option one your contour data is only going to look as good as the data you give it and what I mean is if you could look at this image up here you can see that this is the these gray lines right here the existing data and basically what they gave us is a very nasty looking survey here if I could follow up yeah so they're basically this is the contour from this the survey so it's just like a straight chunk right here not very nice I mean there are ways to clean this up you can definitely try so what you can do since you've already imported the data and the art even part of this line I'm just going to go to the modify panel and this is a little tip go to the delete pi4 future lines even though this is just a regular old polyline so this is nothing more than a polyline here and basically I'm going to say delete and I'm gonna delete this point and then if i zoom in I can see that there's even an extra little point down there so be careful about those all those little tiny extra vertices those can cause your surfaces to do weird things as well then I'm just gonna convert this line real quick to an arc and try and get as close to tangent as possible if you want to do tangents I recommend using the line and curve tools or the alignment tools let's set this to rebuild and let's see if it just some information here so it did didn't making too much better and why is that well this one's a little wavy down here and it's got a lot of little chunks in it so you see all these vertexes that are basically dictating the triangulation so let me turn on the triangles this is why you should have the triangles on whenever you're designing so that way you can see what's going on so I'm just gonna make them pretty light so that way they're not in our face so here's the triangles so this is what civil3d is trying to do is this basically try to take a surface here and what it's trying to do is it's trying to take a vertex and as drawing a triangulation line across to the closest next point that I can find and the same thing and just keep doing that until it completes triangles along the curve here I remember that little parameters about the 1 foot so this is the 1 foot made ordinate distance that's set to this line right now well what happens if I change this line to be a little less so here's another tip for you I'm gonna erase this line out of the data so I'm gonna go say erase and then if I use undo what it's going to do is it's gonna add it back into the surface definitions and I don't want it to do that so I'm gonna use herbs and I'm gonna bring back that line then I'm gonna add the line in back by itself I'll right-click and say add I'm gonna make sure my middle or in it distance is set to a 1 I'm gonna get rid of that add flat thing and just do some swapping edges and then also like this line here now I have this other issue going on what is this and I'll talk about that on a second so basically on that there is a little issue here that is all these little lines that are going across like this and what these are is not to confuse everybody and I'm sure most people don't even know this exists so we all know about the points that are inside of civil3d these coco points we've all heard of auto cad points and then when people say surface points they're not talking about these ones they're talking about the ones that are actually for the triangulation so I need to turn those on so I'm gonna go to the surface style and we're talking about these points the surface points you can adjust the sizes if you don't like them on the colors but I'm gonna go back to the display and I'm going to turn the points here and I'll say okay now there's a different types of points depending on what it is you can see these ones that are like crosses these are the vertexes that are added along the actual line that you made these ones with the circles on them is what civil3d is trying to minimize the flat area and what do I mean by that well remember that little checkbox when we went to the surfaces and we went here and we said let's bring in a contour and we had this little checkbox so whoever built this surface originally just left the defaults of AutoCAD and that's what it was how do you get rid of those we're not going to talk about this I say take a class but there are surface edits and I really am not a fan of people doing a lot of these different edits so you can delete points and stuff the problem with that is then you basically your surface builds a timeline of everything you do and over there you order that you do it and sometimes that timeline gets pushed around and I'll show you what the timeline looks like in a minute but basically you need to it just basically adds in more and more stuff for you to filter and more stuff for you to figure out now what I'm talking about the timeline if you go to the surface properties and then you go to the definitions tab this is your best friend right here we'll talk a little more about some of this other stuff up here at the top but right here is the operations so somebody who originally built this put the contour data and then there here's that checkbox so those little checkboxes that are there are basically the minimize flat area so it says filling gaps add points to flat triangle edges and add points to flat edges and that matches the exact import checkboxes that are right here so this is also an edit that goes in with your contours and these little check boxes dictate what it's saying on here on the spec parameters now I know that this add points to flat triangle edges is not that great so what you can do here is I didn't know this for a very long time but you can actually uncheck these and then you can hit apply and rebuild and then it takes away that edit however it is no longer applying the filling gaps and if you have swapping edges it would no longer apply that as well my best suggestion is just remove this data and then re-import it use the oops command and bring it in that's how I clean out the surface a lot when you do that when you delete the data in here you got to remember to delete these because sometimes these don't delete sometimes when you delete contour data especially if you're just deleting one or two contours it leaves this in here so that's what's happening is even though that contour was a part of this this now have this a problem here with us these extra points that are here so I basically didn't want to I don't want to deal with that all right so what else is next that we can look at here oh I should go back to that so you can see that the contours are looking a little better but they are dictating on are they are using all the vertexes that are along this line which is why they don't look so good so my suggestion is basically to draw in the lines manually and you have to draw every line no please no don't draw every line so what you can do is okay I apologize but basically now what I've done is I've set the style to be a little different so I can see the colors too so you can see the kind of the contour colors here and the red lines are just polylines that I've drawn whenever you draw the polyline command and then you use one of the regular AutoCAD snaps it will automatically go to the elevation that polyline it's not a little tip as well so that way you don't have to sit there and click on each one and try and figure out what the set the elevation of the properties so all's I did is I drew a polyline right here and I drew another one that's a little ways down to right about here to kind of smooth that out these are the existing ones that were already there so you can see those are definitely some crazy looking lines but that's what comes in from surveys so let's go ahead and import these so what I'm gonna do is go over here to definitions and I'll go to contour and I'll say add you can give these names I'm not very good at that I just I don't really give them names but it would make more sense because then you would see that description well i'ma just put a name in there in the definitions and then I'm just gonna do my normal settings that I usually do so remember you want that middle or in a distance that's really important for those curves and we don't want to do that flat triangle digits I'm say okay then I'm gonna select this one and also like this guy and then I'll hit enter and now it gives me a much nicer looking surface or contours again the triangles are a little extra or there's a little excess of them so if I go to triangles and let's just turn those on you can see what that point a one it really adds a lot more triangulation lines but like I said it makes your surfaces look smoother your contours look better and your volumes come out even tighter okay so the next part is once you have those you can still see it's a little bit chunky here so we'll modify that in a second with the second okay so that's a good method that's method one or option one you can still see this part right here does not look as nice as you'd probably want it to look you want that contra to be even smoother so I'm gonna talk to you about an option to dobkin to here and I could make this PDF available for you guys afterwards so that way you have the step by steps so this is option two it's a different place except we're in one of the edits we are gonna use this tool called smooth surface you can also click on a surface go to edit surface and say smooth surface what this does is brings up a little dialog box and then you would never know that in this dialog box cuz it doesn't really tell you but you have to select the output region and the way to do that is to find this hidden button that's here sneaky Autodesk puts a little hidden button I'll show you when we get there and then you're gonna adjust some grid spacing and we're gonna see this number of output points and we want to keep this this one down I found over the years try and keep it down low 60,000 is where computers really start to hurt and that's adding 60,000 points to your surface so you can imagine how crazy that's gonna look so basically you have something like this something better and then but it adds a lot of points so um we'll talk about that in a sec I just go in here and here we have the one we've been working on and let's just say I want to smooth this area you probably shouldn't apply both of the methods that I've done to the same area because sometimes it over processes you should also clean up the surface too so remember I said going to the surface definitions I think this one has a lot of extra junk so if I really don't need these in here it's best just to right-click on them and say remove from definitions and then they'll no longer be causing a mess inside of my my surface for me but I'm not gonna do that so basically what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to draw a polyline make sure you don't do a polyline like this so these are the two lines that I've used to create the contour right so if I I should not cross the lines or cross the data sometimes you're okay sometimes it'll it'll be fine you can go across a wide area but sometimes when there are stuff like like on this surface where there's these little extra points in here you get a lot of weird crazy things going on and and you just shouldn't cross an area so this is the bad line this is the polyline that I drew and make sure it's all straight segments don't do any curves so just do you know little points here and there and just draw a nice little area of where you want to smooth so from there we can basically say alright let's go with the smoothing option now so I'm going to do now I'm just a rebuild real quick and I'm gonna go to the edits and I'm gonna go to smooth surface here's that little tricky box that I was telling you about and there's no place on here that says hey click here you just gotta kind of know this hopefully but basically you're gonna go to select output region and right here is where that hidden button is I know right alright so if you click on it once you're gonna see the three little dots this little button right here is called the ellipsis click on that and sometimes it does this weird glitch I don't know why but if you clicked again now it's asking me a question so it's saying down the command line smooth surface selector region so do you want to do a rectangle do you want to select a polygon or do you want to do a surface please don't ever do a surface don't do the entire surface unless you're doing a really small project that's a couple acres you can probably get away with it and also depending under grid spacing but but don't do it you're gonna sit there forever you're gonna hang your computer up it's gonna crash and you're not gonna it's never gonna come back so what you should do is basically now you just select the polyline I'm gonna have and then I'm just gonna hit enter and it's saying select output region one I think it did a little glitch because I already had it selected previously right here is grid spacing if you're familiar with volume calculations remember how we would do our hand calcs and we do them based on grids so basically it's the same principle and there's also grid surfaces which is like what Google Earth uses and so on so those surfaces are so large that they basically just are in these little tiny squares and the triangles are just square base what this is gonna do is the smaller the number the more squares it has which the more points it has so down here once we put in a number it's gonna tell us what the numbers are so I'm gonna go with the spacing and sometimes depending on the 0.5 but you can remember also think of what you're plotting like what scale is this 20 scale is it 40 scale I'm gonna try to just to see what - looks like so 4 to basically going to do a to a grid of 2 foot by 2 foot squares and it's gonna add 1500 new points that's a lot of points I'm gonna hit OK and then down here at the bottom we'll watch the little computation process and once it's completed you'll see this contour will be nice and smooth those are the contours that you're looking for aren't they however here's the drawback like I said so if I go back to this guy and I go to the surface style and let's just turn on the triangulation or even the points for that mile no that would be too much I hit okay they're about to be blinded so this is what happens basically it's making a two foot by two foot grid but that's what makes the surface look really really nice so if you want your contours to look good you just got to kind of find the trade-offs sometimes I found the number here between two and five works pretty well the last thing like I said I want to talk to you about was that definitions and how you should use it so inside of the definitions there is a build spot and a lot of people use this maybe you have some points or something some data that's below a certain datum so maybe you know your project doesn't go nothing goes below 200 feet or whatever meters or whatever your project it happens to be in and you can say I want you to exclude elevations that are less than than and you can say yes and then you just tell it how what the number is or you can do greater than so maybe somebody has something way too high so if you have all those things at zero it'll basically ignore the zeros which is nice another thing that you should also do is when you feel are adding boundaries which we haven't discussed in here and that's in the surface class but when you add boundaries those should always be pushed to the very bottom of the list and then the smoothing should be pushed the very bottom of that so there's an order of operations here so operation type and I'll show you how to maneuver those around in here so this is the one we've been working on let's go to the surface I you can go over here like I keep doing and right clicking say surface properties we're going just go to the surface properties button up here and I go to the build here's the build and I can say all right well exclude elevations less than and then whatever it is are greater than another one that has here besides the lesson grade of elevations it also has triangle length which this is kind of cool so if you know a triangles you know longer than a couple of hundred feet it's probably not a good triangle because it's probably just triangulating way out to some other point somewhere so you can actually tell it to reject anything that is within a certain length which is really nice and there's a few other things that are in here too but basically down this list so let's just say for instance this was in the wrong place because somebody went in and added some contours after the smoothing and I'm gonna tell you something here is basically what you should do when you're doing the contours information like that if you are gonna start editing your surface again and you've applied a smoothing I always recommend going back into this surface properties into the definitions and then I recommend unchecking the smooth and then just hitting rebuild and then you basically have your surface not it's not gonna process that every single time you make a change when you have rebuild or rebuild automatic it won't do that little thing down that it was doing down here at the bottom so it's just a nice way to start editing and then once you're ready to print your surface or save your file and be done with it for the day then you can go back in check it off and then make sure that you use this little button or this one to basically push it down the list so that should always be at the very bottom of the list boundaries should be right above it because you want it to basically process all the data and then you want to put a boundary or boundaries around it and then the last thing is to smooth after the boundary because you don't want to smooth before boundary and you don't want it smoothing after you've added contour data because then they're gonna get weird stuff again so like I said I wish I would have known about this definitions list many many years ago I'm glad I finally found it one day and it's been a life changer for helping troubleshoot people's surfaces and I can also see how you build your surfaces and what things you're doing and not doing [Music] all right well hopefully those helped today and hopefully you have some other maybe you have some other questions feel free to contact me here's my email I also post a lot of articles on LinkedIn and videos so we also have a YouTube channel as well or I do and I post where this video is going to be and if you want the PDF you can basically just email me and I'll I'll go ahead and send it over to you and then I'm gonna be starting I had a thing called infrastructure universe we've had some issues with it so I'm gonna rename it to a civil inspiration galaxy and we're gonna redo it from there and hopefully if you want to sign up for that just shoot me an email and I'll make sure you get on that list well than that thanks again and hopefully you found something useful

Channel: StarLord James

Views: 4,037

Keywords: civil, 3d, 2020, surfaces, contours, import, data, smoothin, trouble shooting, parameters, mid-ordinate, distance, nice looking, clean, best practice, tips, tricks, autodesk, civil 3d, surface definitions, settings, supplemental factors, adding points to flat triangle edges, adding points to flat edges, TIN, topo, existing surface, eg, fs, finished ground, surface properties, surface definition, operation type, surface edits

Id: 4mv92X2WP-I

Length: 25min 59sec (1559 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020