Site Grading in Civil 3D

[Music] yeah the class to the rock-solid site grading and civil3d we're gonna go through a lot of stuff in here I'm gonna give a little intro a little agenda what we're gonna cover in a quick 60 minutes and then I'm gonna spend most of my time in the software and I just want to give you a little background about myself I know a lot of a lot of you guys but somebody don't know me I've been in autocad civil3d about 20 years the first 10 years I was in production as a civil engineer I did a lot of aviation design the last 10 years I've been a cad consultant for cad technology center out of Minneapolis and lately the last 10 11 months I've been the civil product manager for CTC software and what I do is I design and I create productivity tools for within civil3d I make a suite of tools called the same project suite the same manager suite a lot of you guys use them if you haven't seen them check them out good stuff definitely go go check it out so what are we going to talk about today we're gonna take a site and we're gonna grade that we're gonna start at fairly fundamental levels and then we're gonna get into some more advanced stuff so don't take off if you're like oh I know how to do that thing with the feature line we'll get to some more advanced stuff and hopefully I've got something for everyone I started out with some grading fundamentals we're gonna look at some pond grading that'll be arguably a more kind of novice level strategy for that then we'll get into some parking lot grading some new tricks they're using some of the more recent features in civil 3d and then some of the miscellaneous features you find around sites their own buildings just kind of those odd areas how do you handle that stuff and then dealing with a subgrade surface how do we create a dynamic multi depth parking lot subgrade surface it's a strategy that's been around for a number of years but I've seen a lot of people haven't heard of it yet so I wanted to show it here today so what are we gonna use today nothing fancy we're gonna use feature lines anyone here not used feature lines don't be shy have you not used feature lines right good because I'm not going to like explain what it is and and all that we're gonna skip past those some of those basics but it's how we use these feature lines what the workflow is and surfaces of course we're gonna create those are the byproducts so our main tool is feature lines what we're not going to use are grading tools they're very unstable we're not gonna use corridors they're inflexible in a lot of different ways not going to use 3d polylines they're really hard to edit polyline contours it's 20 19 COGO points it's really tedious and time-consuming we recommend we're not gonna use that for this grading workflow we're gonna do it I've taught site grading classes on corridors and a number of other things what I'm trying to do here today is to take one of the simplest tools feature lines one of the most flexible tools and give you some of the best workflows there are at least that I've I've come up with within civil3d so some of the main tools we're going to be using for working with elevations we're gonna be talking about the quick elevation edit if you don't know about this tool for feature lines write it down it should be one of your number one tools quick elevation edit the elevation editor it's a giant button most people are aware of it there's way better ways to edit things but when you're doing mass head in any many vertices at a time elevation editor is great elevations from surface a really powerful tool will use that a fair amount and then setting a grade between two points I want to hold a two percent between this vertice to another vertex ten of vertices down the line hold the two percent across all those without having to manually set each one that's another great tool if you haven't used that one be aware of it for geometry editing we're gonna use the stepped offset pretty straightforward tool and we're not gonna do a lot of that here but in terms of your geometries it's just drafting a 2-d polylines we're here to do site grading though so are most these tools familiar raise your hand if you've use most these tools okay how many you guys are pretty new to site grading made a few feature lines but kind of confused on the best way to go about it right okay so we got people at different levels this is good we'll start fairly basic one of the things I want to talk about before we really get into it is what's called surface build order every time you do something I had a brake line a boundary to your surface there's a history of what happens this is a dynamic history you can go and remove things you can add things you can change the order of the operations there is a best practice for orders on how you build your surfaces you should always start with brake lines then go to major edits I would call those things like hide boundaries and outer boundaries then we look at minor edits and we always try to minimize this but this would be like swapping edges or deleting lines those kinds of little things and this list over here should always be understandable I should be able to open my surface and understand the operations I've done how many people have opened a surface definition and found like ten thousand operations and it's like swap edge delete line add point all this kind of stuff right how many people have graded that way where they did ten thousand things to their surface right there's a better way there's a better way and I'm going to hopefully explain that today this build order we can edit this while we're grading if I added a boundary and then I added more brake lines but the boundary should come after it I can come in here and change that build order okay so what's our approach to this when you've got a site you've often got a variety of components there's a parking lot there's a berm there's this weird area over here that just needs to drain into the street there's a pond there's all these things so you want to think in terms of components and come up with a strategy for each one of those features or components and there's different strategies some of them simpler some of them more complex we'll talk about some of those today I aim to keep it all in one surface my FG surface is one final surface okay how I manipulate the feature lines to then be added to that surface we might introduce some other surfaces but have one finished grade surface that I'm adding things together you want to grade those components that pond that parking lot and then wait till the end to start thinking about the weird miscellaneous areas in between or the stuff around the building okay tack them attack the big major pieces that really affect your quantities and earth work and and so forth attack those first so a quick workflow we're gonna do some pond grading like I said this is gonna be kind of a beginner level type approach to it but I want just want to make sure we understand the basic use of these tools so I start with creating a high water line or a top of a pond line with a poly line and then I do some stepped offsets to generate benches before that pond I can grab that entire set of feature lines and move it up or down if the height of it or the elevation isn't correct relative to my site I then want to create a top of pound capacity surface and compare that to the pond surface itself to get get my volume what can my pond hold okay it sound like a good place to start okay so I'm gonna attempt a great entire site in 52 minutes okay I've got some pre baked stuff here I'm an attempt to explain the workflow and key steps along the way but as you can see I got seven drawings open here I'm gonna jump through things show you the key key stuff and then say okay rinse repeat times 20 once we've done that here's our result okay so pond grading like I said we're gonna start with a top of pond or high water line or something like that and we're gonna go starting with that polyline and turn it into a feature line really common tool we're taking polylines turning them into feature lines now the first thing right off the bat are sites for all my main break lines or feature lines that go right into my finished grade site I throw them all in the same site in the main I'm gonna call it the main site okay another thing I'd like to do is I use styles in a very very generic way and I'll explain more in a bit but the default will be to set the style to primary and the other thing I like to do is to use select identity layer so that as I've drawn my horizontal geometry on particular layers I just let the feature line land on that same layer and the style itself just has layer by passing so it just picks up the layer so it'd be kind of behaves like behaves like a polyline okay we're gonna erase the existing entities and sign some elevations and to start off with just so we know where we are I'm gonna pull elevations from existing grade okay now here's one of the great uses for elevation editor the simple view where you get all the vertices in your feature line and I use this for mass editing I don't do a point-by-point edit in there there's better tools for that but I can look at and get a sense of my entire pond and and have a starting point right maybe you know the high water online whatever it is we're gonna set this at some point okay so I can do control all in there.and and set that all at once and I now have some kind of baseline so one of the other key tools were using as a stepped offset so I'm gonna offset to the inside here go a slope of negative 10 negative 3 to 1 rather time put another bench we'll put a bench right in there okay so stepped off setting a really basic tool we use to generate 3d offsets of feature lines and at some point is I'm building this down it's gonna like offset unto itself it actually does a pretty nice job of this so depending on what the bottom of the pond should look like I'll just let it kind of trim itself out and it looks something like this if I run a stepped offset and we'll say let's go 16 feet towards the inside the slope of negative three to one they'll just kind of trim it out like that okay now this would be flat down here so I can draw in a basically a bottom of pond or a swale of sorts right here okay and I'll turn that into a feature line as well the other thing I like to do I like with ponds like to think in terms of my my main feature line and the other ones that are kind of more dependent on it and so I'll use layering to control some of that stuff so there's a primary the secondary there's some color difference hopefully you can see it and it's it's it it's as simple as this and then I move on and we just put it right into the upgrade finished grade surface okay the description you give it here this shows up in that surface build order we want we talked about understanding the build of our surface right give meaningful descriptions to your sets of break lines you're putting in to your surface what are these numbers down here how many people know what these are down here oh we got to know what these are these are really important so generally we know what a surface is right it's a bunch of regular kind of triangles that connect to break lines we added a surface but how often does it triangulate how much does it connect okay this is pretty important to getting the right level of detail but not too much detail in our surface if I set the distance to 10 it means triangles are gonna connect on straight segments at least every 10 feet okay once you see these triangles it'll make sense the mid or the distance this is about triangulation along a curve okay this is basic geometry back to elementary school or high school or I don't remember where but the lower the value the more it's along a curve this is really important because what's the number one thing that like pm's and people complain about civil3d grading ah the contours look like crap right this is one of your secrets to make the contours look Leslie crap so know what these values are let's turn on our triangles as well that's a straight segment right there that distance is the help menu nine point nine seven five five okay just divided that segment piece such that I didn't go over ten what about along curves okay it triangulated at that frequency such that the distance right there was no more than point one okay most of you guys didn't raise your hand when I asked you know what what if you knew what these are you have to know how these behave your homework is go back play with these values add brake lines and them again go with the values up and down and understand what it's doing dear ten this is one of the key parts of understanding how to cite grade effectively is to understand how this surface reacts to the brake lines you add to it a couple things we got to fix up here this is supposed to be a swale of sorts in the bottom here these elevations aren't quite right okay don't use this tool we've got point by point editing tools that's where quick elevation and it comes into play okay if you're not using this and you only use this start using this quick elevation at it and this is at the way this works is a hover over a point a twenty one point two seven I can change the slope set that to zero set that to zero everything is 821 point two seven okay if you're not using quick elevation edit you're welcome we talked about the how things triangulate right this looks like pretty decent triangulation right enough to get the right detail countries are decent but it's not like a bazillion triangles so my drawing turns into a hundred Meg's but then your surface will start to do stupid things like this why is it doing that and what would you normally do swap the edge right okay avoid all that like the what I call band-aid fixes to it don't swap the edge understand how this is behaving these triangles connect to the nearest so to speak the nearest vertex that they can write so really what needs to happen is this line needs to go from here to there wouldn't a brake line solve that so here's where I introduce the concept of secondary brake lines and it's where I use this secondary feature line style secondary brake lines are meant to control triangulation but you don't edit them I don't need to change this elevation here or here I don't need a different feature line to be able to do that okay I just need a brake line to control the triangulation so what does this look like just run the basic feature line command set this to secondary I'll explain how that works in a second use the current layer and then just snap to there the prompts for elevation accept the elevation snapped in the midpoint okay and then do the same over here grab them both add to our surface okay default your template to these values 10.1 those are good values okay and it does what I want it to now why do we do that and why do we not swap an edge because it's a break line it's and if I move the break line around the ten moves with it right when you swap edge is this kind of band-aid fix to it and then when you come next to it and throw a break line over that swapped edge and then you delete a line mysteriously you start getting holes in your surfaces this weird stuff starts happening don't do the band-aid fix the swap edge the delete line do this instead time now what does it mean to have choo chosen to different feature line styles raise your hand if you know what feature line style hierarchy is three people okay this is a real cool thing it's really hidden how do when these two feature lines cross and they touch each other which one controls well normally it's like whatever one you edited last but if I'm saying I don't want this one to ever control how do you control that if I go into my site and I right-click this what I mean by it's hidden right click on the feature lines category in your site and go to properties there's an options tab in here that called feature line crossings split point resolution I don't even know what that means its feature line style hierarchy okay your styles are listed here all feature lines with the style primary will control over the ones with the style secondary it's kind of a weird thing in fact I knew it was there for a couple years and I never really thought about how to use it this is a good way to use it and the way it's advantageous is that I can put in break lines and I never have to manage their elevations because they're just connected to other break lines and if those break lines move those I'll just move along with it so if I pick this feature line right here and I raise it up point five okay those just move right with it well that seems pretty straightforward because I had a vertex on that one but what about these normally if I did a raise on this or lower in fact let's do a lower on this negative one just to make it drastic there's no vertex right here on this curve that thing would be like stuck at the higher elevation the feature line style at Harkey makes it pull all those vertices down that makin sense okay understand future line style hierarchy and definitely understand basic triangulation from your future lines it's really important to get decently looking surfaces so you don't have to do that terrible thing where we explode our surface and manually manipulate all the polyline contours right we're trying to avoid that and it's possible we just have to understand on civil3d things okay those are the basics everyone with me so far okay some of this is pretty basic for folks right they've done this kind of thing okay maybe a couple new tricks there we're gonna move on to the parking lot what's interesting about grading and parking lots so much detail right all these curve islands and things curving all over the place it's kind of drain this way and that way and all these things but if you if you separate the horizontal geometry from the vertical geometry it gets a little simpler and what I mean by that is it's the horizontal geometry that's complex but what's the vertical geometry it can be fairly simple sheep drained to a catch basin here sheep drained to a catch basin here that's fairly simple if I don't have to think about the elevations at each and every like curb point to make that happen okay so what I'm going to introduce here is the concept of a set up surface or an auxilary surface or a drainage surface how many people have heard of this how many people have used it how many people have used it effectively okay it's got its place right like it's okay if my whole parking lot she trains one way it's great so what I'm gonna do is show you how to use it but then at some point you say well I can't control enough of it with that and then we step away from it and we do more detailed grading but I still think there's a good use for a set up surface to get you to at least 75% design so those are you never see now I'm gonna walk you through it here and those you have hopefully I've got a few new tips for you so parking lots we're gonna create a drainage pattern with a set up surface we're gonna link the curb feature lines which are those ones you saw there to the set up surface we're gonna use a relatively new feature where you can make feature lines relative to a surface such that if the surface changes the feature line vertices will change with it we're going to add those curb lines to the exact same finished grade surface we put the pond brake lines in remember those those secondary brake lines we made we're gonna have to do a couple of those in here and then for gradient adjustments where we need to meet ata requirements or volumes are what we want we can adjust the setup surface or I'm going to show you how to quickly break away from your feature lines your curbs being linked to a setup surface may be in an entrance area or by the building I just want to manually grade that but the rest of it can all sheet drain the way I want it to okay I'm never gonna run a slope analysis using a different surface style such that it will flag areas that are too flat too steep for us that kind of thing so I'm going to do a lot of clicks here I'm not gonna say every click okay that the idea is not for you guys to write down every little click I do here get a appreciation on the workflow go back to your office and try it on your own so a setup surface is a simple surface that defines a drainage pattern and if it's a fairly simple site like this I start with a rectangle and what you want to do with it is to draw a rectangle that covers every vertex in your feature lines except where it has to tie into an existing okay now ideally we would control all these elevations with this setup surface but again like I said we'll break away from it where we need to okay I'm gonna turn this thing into a feature line in a bit but I also need more feature lines that represent swales and ridges in my parking lot but what I'm doing is they're Nouri ignoring a lot of the key little geometry points these curve islands this kind of stuff I'm considering them for where swales or ridges go so what it looks like we start putting it together and so you guys know this stuff when you're starting out on a site you've done some analysis of the existing grade where does this need to drain to where is my pond right so where you put these start to dictate where or based on rather what kind of drainage pattern you need across and away from your parking lot I'm gonna leave it fairly simple because we have only so much time but what I'm looking at is I'm draining towards catch basins at these curve Islands here obviously I'm draining away from the building here I've got a tie-in over here I've got a tie-in over here okay there's a lot of little considerations beyond just this but I can start to kind of panel out my parking lot and do it in ways that make sense right a look down the center of a curve Island maybe another one would go right along here okay the concepts the same so you would likely put more grid lines in here than this but the point that was important here is that you guys understand the process and what we want to do is we want to take these turn them all into feature lines and here's where we veer from the same surface insight we're gonna put these in a different site we don't want these interacting with all of our primary grading feature lines it's going to be a secondary or a different surface so I've got a separate site called parking lot setup and then they're gonna be sorry I've used those terms interchangeably a little bit they're gonna be primary but within their own site and then I'm gonna assign elevations and what I'm starting at is what we know for the building finished floor right now it's 835 okay what this set up surface represents is the gutter elevations or the pavement elevations in my parking lot so we're going down a half a foot from that assuming a half a foot curb so 830 4.5 and it's just a starting point I'm going to grab all of these right I got to start somewhere I don't but I'd have to start somewhere yeah so I there's some assumption if that's still in flux absolutely but what we're trying to set up is something a model that allows me to you know when the architect changes that you know every other day I can respond to it more easily right once a week maybe I used to do a lot of aviation grading and was along terminals and I swear it was every other day the building designer be like ah bring the terminal finish floor up to tents and then like two days later is down to tents and it was drove me nuts we're gonna add or put these in a different surface a parking lot set up surface same supplementing factors okay now what I want to do is start to define sheet drainage regions within my site okay and what's really handy for this is to create feature line labels that label the spot elevations and the slopes on them but the other thing we got to do is we've got to put some more vertices in there so I'm going to do a little bit of this and then we're gonna jump forward to the pre-baked next drawing so we're these gridlines are crossing we'd want common vertices like this so down here you want to insert common vertices like this okay and once you do that then throw your labels on here okay and what I'm talking about is I've got some built in here and it allows me to drop feature line labels on there these are basic line and curve labels such that it labels the end points and the slopes at the same time and now when I'm working with a feature line and I pick this and I go yeah put that at a negative 0.5 the elevations update for me okay little regen little refresh okay this makes site grade a way faster okay they're kind of complicated label Styles if you guys want I can send this drawing out and you can use these Styles good okay really makes it easier do it on your ponds throw those labels anywhere you want really helpful okay pull the next drawing out of the oven all I've done is I've gone through quick elevation editor and I've started making edits to those where I started making decisions well I'm assuming the buildings here and we're coming here and we're sloping down at a negative 2% okay and that's gonna be my low point up here we're coming down and I might not even know it's just preliminary at this point okay that's a negative two point two okay all the while my labels are updating that grid surface is updating and I'm getting an appreciation for the general sheet drainage pattern across my parking lot okay now my goal for this is to be able to define all the elevations along these curb lines that's what we're after here or at least a 75% complete elevation starting point okay this setup surface making sense so far it's pretty simple right but you've got to think in terms of not don't think in terms of this point right there at my back a curb and then this point and then this one think in terms of where am i draining to where am i draining from word I have to tie in right what's the building at think of those kinds of things every site is different right so it's there's a lot of creativity there frankly I think site grading is probably one of the hardest things in civil3d to do because every project is different right what do we do from here okay I've got surfaces this is where the tool to assign elevations from a surface really come in handy so I'm gonna do a few of these and then we'll kind of skip over doing all of them but you'll get an idea of it so if I pick my gutter line polylines these are just polylines right now and you'll notice I don't have my lip or my flag of curve I'm ignoring that for the sake of this because most the time it doesn't it doesn't matter enough it's not that we're not gonna build it in there but whether you do tip out or tip in curb I don't necessarily need to account for that you could do the same strategy I'd argue we can do it after class that you don't need that level of detail here so let's pick all those gutter lines and a strategy I always do is keep the gutter lines on a different layer than the top and the back of curb why because we're gonna sign elevations from surface but the pink ones are gonna be a half a foot above the surface the other ones are gonna be right at the surface I want to be able to select all those feature lines at once and attach them so layering coupled with select similar work really nice so turn them into feature lines I'm gonna put them in the main site right hey everything goes in the main site and the FG surface except for these like supplementary things we're doing the set up surface okay these are gonna be primary and I'm gonna sign elevations and here's where we're using one of the new features not only from the parking lot setup surface but I'm gonna make it relative to it I'll just put this in here for this reason for this concept among others this is one of them and so I'm trying to I want to show you guys a way to take advantage of this relative to the surface and I can put a value in there too I'm not going to insert intermediate grade break points because what would that do it put in a ton of vertices at every little triangle crossing I don't need that many points so I'm going to leave that off and what I end up with is all these red feature lines you see now they have elevations and if I look at elevation editor those points are relative to the surface except for the outside points that I left outside of my setup surface so that those could simply be attached to existing ground and those we're just using quick elevation at it tech here s for surface select the existing grade surface accept that okay here's another built in sub command within the quick elevation editor it's kind of cool the reference command so click R for reference it says specify a reference point okay now specify a point I'm sorry I'm getting ahead of myself these aren't feature lines yet I'll show you that in a minute it's a it's a cool little feature so right now all the gutter lines are relative to the surface and then I'll have set these points attached to exist in okay you can yeah go ahead yes yes sorry I wasn't clear the question was does relatives to surface mean dynamic and absolutely it does in fact you'll see this grayed out here because it is dynamic in that way let's do let's do a little experiment okay this feature line this point is that point right there right its elevation is 820 2.6 - okay when I take this grid feature line it'll affect those and I'll just do a one so you can see it I'm add a 1.83 3 click on this set it to a 2 once I run this you're gonna see those are your close up that that should update 830 271 okay we change at 9 hundredths it's dynamic okay that's that's kind of the important part of this now before this feature was there you could always just go back and grab the set of feature lines and reassign them from the surface what address has done is they've added this dynamic relativity so that it automatically updates for you know it's um Kyle helped me out 19 18 18 okay yeah since 18 and with stats all you guys are all 18 right okay okay making sense right now we've made feature lines dynamic - or relative to the surface what's different about the top occurred in the back occurred nothing we just have a half a foot difference in relativity so from objects let's do that again select similar and a bunch of feature lines I'm going to create at once from objects it's gonna go into the main site okay it's only those grid lines that go in the the parking lot set up site and then we're gonna signs elevations relative to parking lots set up and this time we're gonna go up a half a foot gives me some information that says some of those things were outside of the surface I've made them absolute elevation cool that's what I wanted okay now some of the manual work you have to do is to add elevation points at those key high points or low points in your grid right I need to put an elevation point right here okay I need to do that at these different key points okay a little bit tedious so I'm not gonna do that 40 times in front of you but once you run that keep in mind that that new point I just made it's not relative so go grab all your feature lines again and I want to show you a little trick with this once you've got feature lines created and you want to sign elevations to them or like relink them to the surface with new vertices you've created you got to use this old AutoCAD command otherwise you're picking like 20 feature lines on the screen so here's here's the workflow I pick one feature line and then I do select similar okay now all of those are selected escape out of that pick one of them again and then go to elevations from surface okay I come in here yep parking-lot set up its point five above that and now normally we'd go and pick pick pick but instead do multiple in the command line and then here's where it doesn't even give you a sub command hit P for previous P is your previous selection set and when I do this you're gonna see all of these guys highlight it's it's kind of hard to tell but trust me they all highlighted enter again you'll see all those vertices highlighted they're about to update all of them and it reassigns all those vertices to the surface okay layering selects similar use that stuff to your tiered advantage click why did I do that because I've got yeah so the I didn't want to have to pick them all manually I got 30 of them 20 of em but I don't have to go pick pick pick all the time and every time I add lakewell put another vertex in there I want to make it relative to a surface it's easy to just say grab the whole set make it all relative again so I don't have to think about it it just it just does it for me yeah okay okay so this is all those feature lines with those extra vertices added in there okay once we have that we move on to adding them to our actual FG surface so I'm going to take the setup surface turn that off and I'm going to grab all of these add them into FG I'm gonna curbs okay my favorite tool object viewer time gives us a nice visual anyway how is that like crap kind of sword um okay you can start to see right our curve Islands coming to life in there okay even if we don't make those relative even if I don't do that getting me to some kind of sixty seventy percent complete is a really it's really fast this way right so use it at least for that even if you don't keep those things relative to the setup surface I'd argue you there's portions at least of your parking lot you'll be able to keep relative and then other areas and I'll show you this in a bit you can break the link from the surface and then just say like well this got to put a high point I gotta do something different in there right but here's what we don't have in this surface yet I don't have I've got swales and ridges that come in here so what should I do right through here what do we do on the pond the secondary feature line I don't need to grade anything differently there I have the surface data I just need to throw a feature line in there that controls the triangulation so it look like this drawing a polyline right here there there meant to have these on different layer okay now I grab these two I turn them into future lines and here's the key I set them as secondary why do I set them as secondary read only elevations when I change these curve islands and I move those up and down either manually or through the setup surface I don't want to have to worry about what these feature lines that are really just controlling the ridges and swales in the parking lots I don't worry about them so take advantage of feature line style hierarchy and let those just float up and down with the surface and the primary feature lines they're going to go into the main site so the only interaction we have with the set up surface and site is by making vertices relative to the surface but don't put the feature lines in the same site it's when you want to veer away from the set up surface for more detailed grading it's going to get you in trouble if you could absolutely stick with the set up surface controlling every elevation you could throw them in the same site but I just don't think that's realistic so assign elevations from parking set up relative to that and it's going to be zero add those into the surface the FG surface right and I'm starting to get swales ridges that I'm after okay and I'm not gonna do it over and over to prove it to you guys but right all these elevations are relative to the surface anything I do to these orange gridlines effect those curb lines right now that the deader lines and the top and back occur I can sit here in a minute this is like one big kind of clay model I can push and pull around now what about when I'm not actually I do want to show it to you once the surface we see right now the contours we see right now those are the FG surface not the surface that the orange feature lines are in let's do a few more edits to this just so we can see it interact I come here into a negative 0.5 you'll see that FG surface responding I'm coming over here doing a negative 2 okay that FG surface the curve Island everything is moving with it okay if all of our sites were just cookie cutter we could just do that all day long and it'd be simple right but how do we start to break away from that maybe I need to bring this up a little bit I screw the set up surface I just need to pull that up some right and so what you do is you just run quick elevation at it and when I do this I'm gonna keep this open so you can see what happens if I run quick elevation edit on this point it's 834 0.01 I want to go up to eight thirty four point five that point just switched to absolute elevation I just broke the link from the surface okay now here's the little extra tool I wanted to show you I've got reference in here if I'm changing that and I brought that up five tensor three tenths or whatever I'm doing with it I want those to respond in kind but be different by 0.5 ok I'm breaking the link from the surface so now it's manual editing but how quickly can we do that use the reference tool to ask me to pick a reference point this one specify a point this one and now I can do D for difference and I can do 0.5 I can now say that vertex relative to this vertex on a different feature line make it 0.5 it's just it's still manual editing but it's a quick way to do it and you don't have to think about eight thirty three point nine seven eight eight thirty four point four seven like all these things it's just point five point five right that makes sense it's not dynamic it's a one-time thing there's no dynamicism between those points or feature lines the only dynamic is that word the only dynamicism you get is between a feature line and a surface you run quick elevation at it and then you'll get a sub command for reference pick that and then it says says reference point so in this case we'll pick this one now pick point what's the difference well in that case it's zero points outside of your setup so these out here you're saying that are outside the setup surface those I just pulled elevations from existing surface and you can do that right in a quick elevation command yeah so these I haven't done and so I should do that I should run the reference right there put it up point five D for difference point five yeah if your surface your existing surface is perfect there then do a surface reference but I know mine's not perfect there it won't stay dynamic if it's is it can only by dynamic to a surface yeah Kyle right right and to be clear here what I'm doing right here with quick elevation edit and then I have surface in the sub command and then I'm picking eg hey all of that that's not making it relative that's giving me a one time read of the surface but it's existing that's not moving now I could go in there I'm sorry I can't go in there and have one vertex relative to one surface and another one relative to another the feature line as a whole gets one relative surface up here then I can say which vertices actually respond to that or not you mean for there's there's some other tricks you could do like you could break the feature line right here and make that feature line those curves relative to eg you could put them in the same site and then make this feature lines secondary in that primary I think it's a lot of BS right there's there's other ways to get tricky with it but we've got eight minutes and there's only so much time for trickery let's let's move on a little bit I want to quickly mention the analysis option how do I know I have the right slopes on here use a slope analysis slope style surface style rather do three ranges spell out your two flat range skip over your slopes are good range 1 to 2% do a well 2 to 5 those might be good depends on where it is and then 5 plus everything's entirely too steep it's shades where your problem areas are and I can even add a slopes legend 0 to 1 2 to 5 here's the colors here's the triangles ok go and manipulate your gradient surface or if you're doing manual editing right and the triangles just disappear right so they disappear because I said 1 to 2 percent don't color those you could have them colored green or whatever you want to do but the point is you're looking for like flat areas I've got flat areas down here can I manipulate my my setup surface to handle that and now I got to do one of those overrides again ok you might have to do that kind of stuff in entrances that being said there's no limit to what you put into your setup surface I can put a feature line here I can put another one however you want to do it right what makes sense for you it's gonna vary from site to site hey let's look at some of this miscellaneous grading what about just grading limits out here I'm gonna move along kind of quickly with this I'm gonna draw a polyline maybe I've got hard-coded defined Grady limits maybe it's not that defined okay turn this into a feature line put it in the main site make it primary and assign elevations from where from eg right this is where we're tying in and we can make it relative to EJ as well now here's the thing when I'm doing this I don't like to insert all those extra elevation points automatically I'll run this here insert elevation point and do an increment and something reasonable like 10 or 20 feet and then I'll grab elevations from surface up here and reassign all those to eg relative by zero okay so all of those are relative to the eg surface makes sense and so if I move this around right those change with them I simply add that to FG what about the building grab that polyline I've got assign elevations what's my starting point while I know finish floor is 8:35 let's start with that put this into the surface right away so this miscellaneous grading that's what we're talking about here it's just about getting creative with what feature lines you're using okay use that same feature line to poke a hole in your surface to a hide boundary for the building poke a hole in it okay same thing down here grab your feature lying along your existing curb there or wherever you're grading limits are going to be about areas like this little miscellaneous areas I'm going to control some of the triangulation in here let's set it to secondary go from right here had that guy in the surface thank you why does it start triangle ad in there remember surface build order my boundary needs to be last so here's what I'm talking about understand your history put your boundary last okay so sometimes you throw in those brake lines in you you forget that you had a boundary in there all right one last step I want to I want to show here and if it's all right I might go a couple minutes past five is that okay I promise it's cool creating a variable depth subgrade surface it's pretty straightforward process but it's kind of a weird concept behind the scenes we're trying to generate a subgrade surface for the parking lot that accounts for variable section depths maybe there's a heavy duty payment and a light duty payment where the section depth is different I want to create this and I want to be dynamic 2fg and I don't want to have to draw a bunch of feature lines and offset them and raise and lower them and add them in a different surface and all this kind of stuff now okay was create a few surfaces but I want it to be dynamic here's what it looks like create some polylines that represent the regions for those different pavement areas okay 12 inch sub grade in a 18 inch okay put those into a surface sub grade depth we'll call this okay if I look at that surface subgrade depth we will add in those two polylines and what do I get if we look at this surface quickly I get a surface with brake lines in it that's equal to the elevation of those polylines the elevation holes polylines have been set to the depth of the section one is at one foot deep or one foot one is at 18 inches there's that jump okay so we're making a surface out of polylines this has a elevation of 1.5 the other one has one okay hang with me a bit this is weird right why would I be making brake lines down at elevation one okay our next step create a volume surface between FG and that surface all volume surfaces is a comparison of two surface surfaces so ten volume that's gonna be the subgrade volume and the base surface will be that subgrade depth that thing that's down at 12 inches or 18 inches and the comparison will be FG and what do I end up with this is where it's kind of cool let's grab the subgrade depth surface subgrade volume surface and FG and look at those in object viewer and we'll start to understand what we are creating there's my surface way at the bottom at elevation 12 inches in 18 inches here's FG what's underneath it a subgrade surface so what is a volume surface if there is no thickness to it it's simply the difference in elevations of two surfaces at a given point well if I got a surface a point up here at 8:32 and one at one right my subgrade depth surface at one what's the difference between those 831 that makes sense it's a weird way to use volume surfaces but all I'm really after is a surface that is what 18 inches less or one foot less or 2 foot less than my FG surface this is all dynamic 2fg right if the engineer comes back and says no it's it's a two foot section go move that poly fine polyline to elevation to feet and your subgrade surface will move with it there's one other catch to it this subgrade volume surface you have to add that into a different surface you have to paste it in and the reason is is because you can't compare a volume surface to a regular surface because what are we after with this subgrade surface I want to compare it to eg to get my common cuts and fills okay so you simply make a new subgrade surface and in that you use the paste surface command and you drop in subgrade volume okay I can now compare that to eg and I get a comparison of the two okay kind of makes sense kind of weird trickery it's it's it's simpler it's as simple as this draw polylines at elevations that represent the depth make a surface compare that to FG that'll give you your subgrade surface paste that into a regular 10 surface so that it can be compared to eg to get those common cuts and fills less your import materials okay couple things concluding guys a lot of stuff I threw at you here when you grade your site's you've got to think about a little bit got a plan first and then go grade the stuff you want to strike a balance between flexible and dynamic dynamic is set up surfaces and parking lots flexible it's just independent feature line editing you want to minimize the number of feature lines and vertices the more that you have the more you have to manage and assign elevations always minimize that and remember those those brake line factors think about how surfaces react to feature lines this is really important your contours will look like crap if you don't have that and always edit the source notice we didn't do any editing on the surface yet the surface doesn't have any editing on it and I've got a lot of nice triangulation and contours on it okay like I said avoid direct editing those surfaces thanks everyone for watching your evals be sure to fill out those I will take questions now people can ask them now but I want to let everyone go so you can come up and ask me as well if you want my contact info there's cards up front here by the projector or on the screen that's all I got for you guys thank you you

Channel: CTC Software

Views: 36,648

Keywords: Civil 3d, site grading, CTC Software, Product Info, Cvil 3d, Webinar, training, civil 3d training, CIM, CIM Project, Brian Levendowski

Id: tK6xM2b-jPs

Length: 64min 47sec (3887 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020