Surface Housekeeping Made Easy

Surface housekeeping can be a bit time consuming if you don't know the tricks of the trade. I'm going to show you how to quickly cleanup and optimize your surfaces so that they are accurate and report accurate earthwork results. All of these setting options take place in the Surface Properties Dialog box. To access this click on your surface in your drawing space and then from your contextual ribbon select "Surface Properties".

           

In the Surface properties dialog box select the "Definition" tab and then expand the "Build" category. We have 3 different settings we are going to look at. The first one is the "Exclude elevations less than" option. This option will control those points that have been added to the surface definition but don't contain a value (eliminating those "0" spikes from our surfaces). Doing this will resolve most black holes in the contours and result in more accurate earthwork calculations. Set the value for "Exclude elevations less than" to "YES" and then in the "Elevation" value just below enter "1".

 Next we will look at "Using a Maximum Triangle Length". This one will require you to look at your surface data to determine the best value for your project. Do a couple of quick measurements to check the approximate topo grid shot spacing in your data and then choose a maximum triangle length that exceeds the longest value. This may take some trial to get the correct value and although it will not remove all the extraneous triangles it will remove a majority. This is very handy in the event you don't have a surface boundary to add to the definition. In the Same dialog box set the "Use a maximum triangle length" to "YES" then below that input the maximum value you determined in the last step.





And lastly lets take a look at the newest option added to the 2013 release. "Maximum angle between adjacent TIN lines" This option will in most cases resolve the remaining extraneous triangle lines in your surface. Again based on your data you may need to do a little trial on this to get the correct value. Set the "Use maximum angle" value to "YES" and then in the angle value just below enter your value (180 is the default).

Happy Surfacing!

Civil 3d 2013 is here!

I know its been awhile and I know I have been neglecting you all but trust me when I say, I'm vowing to post regularly on a going forward basis. So lets talk about the new Civil 3d 2013. It's new, It's here, and it's got a lot of really cool tools. Over the coarse of my next few posts I plan on showcasing many of these new enhancements and tools. Exciting things to mention are

• Pressure Pipes (Yeah, finally)
• Cloud Access
• Rail design
• New enhanced Corridor tool
• New Volumes Dashboard
• New Drive tool
• Survey Query tools
• Embedded Sub Assembly Composer
• ....and more.

Since we have all been waiting so long for it I figured I'd start with Pressure Pipes. Pressure pipes are an entirely new entity within Civil 3d and have there own catalogues, parts lists, labels and styles much like the traditional gravity pipes that were previously available. You can lay your network out in plan view with the compass tool that will allow you to snap to fitting increments based on previous deflection. You can also draw your network in profile view and then come back and make changes and add appurtenances. You can then perform interference checks for quality control. Now I'd love to tell you that this is the "end all, beat all" tool we've always wanted but I'd just be blowing smoke. The tools are not AT ALL bad but not as flexible and user friendly as we would like them to be. Still it is a great start and I'd personally like to thank Autodesk for finally including this functionality to help us round out our "one-stop-shop" we call Civil 3D. I look forward to seeing were they take these tools from here. Below are a few screen shots to give you a taste of the tools if you haven't have a chance to experience them yet. Check back soon for more.