Creating a Surface in Civil 3D from GIS Data Part 2

hi this is Brian Haley with CAD 1 a value-added reseller an award-winning training center out of Denver Colorado and today I'm going to go through part two of creating a shape file taking a shape file and making it into a surface I've already gone through part one and it's much simpler method but it doesn't quite give you as good results and I'll post a link to that so let's just go ahead and get into this so here's the results of what I did earlier in part one as you can see it created a surface the surface is good for a lot of cases but you can see it it doesn't do a whole real good job here and you know it's missing some data points and maybe it's not quite good enough for you so I'm going to show you another method now the way I'm going to do this the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to import the contours into a blank drawing just as AutoCAD entities the way we do that is we use the map import command so I'm going to bring those in grabbed in a shapefile the important thing here is I want to include data so I'll click there where it says data and then I'll click on the ellipses and I want to tell it to create the object data now honestly the only one I'm interested for this is the contour ele alright this field right here I could toggle the rest of them off if I wanted to but my philosophy is it's better to have the data and not need it than need the data and not have it so I'll go ahead and turn that on select ok and ok it's going to process those bring them into my drawing after a quick zoom extents I'll be able to see everything zoom extents and there they are now these are just polylines so if I select one it's simply a poly poly line if I go into my AutoCAD properties what you'll notice is the elevation of this polyline is set to 0 that doesn't work very well for us however I do have the elevation of it in this field that was coming from the shapefile so what I want to do is I want to sign each polylines elevation from its contour elevation field now I can't do that in this drawing so I'm gonna go ahead and close this drawing and I'm going to save it yes I want to save it I'll call this one bass contours so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a brand new drawing and I'm going to query these contours into that new drawing and as I do that I'm going to alter the elevations of them so I Here I am in this new drawing now to do a query you have to use the map tool so I'm going to turn on my map workspace so map W space I'll go ahead and turn that on now most of the time when this comes up the display manager will be the current tab I'm going to switch that to the map Explorer and I want to attach that base contour drawing to this one so I'll right click on drawings and choose attach now I can't find my drawing because it's on a different network drive so what I need to do is I need to create a tribe alias which is this button right over here so I'll go ahead and browse to my location which it happens to default to I'll give it a name so this will be berry County now no spaces so that's why I put the underscore in there and then you add it don't forget to add it and now on my pulldown there's my berry County I'm gonna go ahead and add in my base contours here select ok and that drawing is now attached now I can't attach the drawing if it's open that's why I had to close it and now what I want to do is I want to create a query so I'll right click on current query I'll define the query now a couple of things I need to do here first I need to tell what part of that other drawing I want to query from and in this case I want to do the entire thing so I'll click on location leave my boundary type set to all and select ok and now I've started my query you have to tell it where you want to go now if I knew the area ahead of time I could pick just that area to bring that stuff in but I'm gonna bring everything in the other thing I want to do is I want to alter the properties I want to change the elevation of the objects to match the elevation from that object data so I'll toggle on elevation as the property and want to change and then I'm going to come down here and I'm going to create an expression the expression in this case is extremely simple I simply wanted to use this contour le prop feet are filled from the shapefile don't forget to add here if you don't add it doesn't work I've done that several times so it's okay now I'm not quite ready to execute the query yet right now if I were to execute the query it would just show me the results I don't want to just see the results I actually want to be able to use it so I'm going to change my query mode to draw go ahead and execute that query give this a moment quick zoom extents and there they are so once again I'm gonna go ahead and select one of those polylines I'll go into my properties and as you can see now it definitely does have that elevation 1340 here and as you can see that matches the contour elevation field from the shape file and now I simply create my surface now I know the area that I'm interested in so let me go ahead and insert my area of interest here and I'm gonna create a surface now a couple of things I want to point out real quick about this surface alright first of all we'll just give it a quick name GIS contours or whatever you want and I'm gonna use the same style that I used before so that five foot and 25 foot to design just to be a little bit consistent here because I've got a ton of data here I want to add the boundary in first so I'm gonna right click on boundaries choose add and I'm gonna do this as a data clip boundary basically this just prevents any data outside of the boundary from being added into the surface and I always change my mid order distance to at least at the most point one in this case it really doesn't matter because this is a rectangle but it's a good habit to get into so I'll go ahead and select that boundary and now I will add in the contours right click on contours choose add again there's that nasty minora net distance change it to 0.1 and what I recommend is toggle on all four of these minimize flat areas by options including the swapping edges I don't care what any book you've ever read says I don't care what the best practices guide that ships with the program says that you want to toggle all four of these on trust me on this you'll get a much better surface I'll select okay there it's gonna ask me which objects do I want to add I'm gonna go ahead and add all of them and then I will deselect my boundary there because I don't want that to be a part of it make sure I D selected it wrong button there we go hopes if you hold down the right button and I'm gonna do this real time I'm not gonna pause the video and you can see how quick this goes massive amounts of data in a fairly short time because I've got that data clip boundary there and what I want you to see is these contours in this area here give a much better representation of what I'd imagine the surface would look like if I switch back over to the surface from the shape file and you see this whole area right here is extremely flat it's not flat but it's very close to being flat if I switch back over here to the one that I created this time in this area right here it looks much better like than what I would expect it to now it's not perfect I've still got some flat areas in here but it's nothing like what I got from the GIS data so this is the way I would recommend if you need to make sure you maintain that density of the data and you want to get a much better representation of your surface love to hear what you guys think post comments and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: C3DPlus

Views: 9,177

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: AutoCAD Civil 3D, Surface, GIS, .shp, Shapefile, Contours

Id: Nndffp9Yz9s

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2015