Discover how to add break lines into a drawing based on a survey, create a new point group and incorporate it into a surface. This in-depth guide illustrates the process of using real spatial elevation points in drawing surfaces, creating and applying new point groups, and adding break lines, all using Civil 3D.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of adding break lines into a drawing, starting by using real spatial elevation points located at parcel corners. This process ensures that these crucial points are incorporated into the drawing surface.
- Creating and applying a new point group is a key part of the process. The article provides step-by-step instructions on how to create a point group, called 'found mons', and add it to the surface definition in Civil 3D.
- The procedure also involves adding break lines based on survey figures imported into Civil 3D. These break lines are added to a specific surface and behave normally as standard break lines, providing a more detailed definition of features such as roads and sidewalks in the drawing.
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In this video, we're going to go ahead and add some break lines into our drawing based on our survey, and we're going to create a new point group and add that point group to our surface as well. So what we have is we have a couple of points that are actually based on real spatial elevation points, and those are our found points at the corners of these larger parcels, and they're not being used to display our surface currently, and I want to go ahead and make sure those are added into our surface.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on points group. I'm going to select new. I'm going to put it as found mons.
I'm going to go ahead and choose raw description matching FND. I'm going to make sure it says include with raw description matching. I'm going to check my overrides and make sure nothing's checked.
I'm going to check my points list, and so I'm going to see all of these found points that we have here, and they are all full description of FND IP. I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and hit okay. Now we have a found mons point group right here, and I'm going to go ahead and go to point groups, right click add.
I'm going to select found mons. I'm going to hit apply and hit okay, and so what we should see is now those found mons are being added in as a surface definition. So moving on from here, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to add in some break lines.
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Now one of the things that we have available to us because we did a survey import is that we have these feature lines or these figures, these survey figures that were brought into Civil 3D with certain elevations in mind because they're based on points that were in our survey import. So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go to our survey tab. We're going to go to our Civ 201 import.
Now if yours is closed for some reason, you know like this, it looks like this with a closed Civ 201 import. Don't do the double click so that you get into your edit or your non-editable mode. You want to go ahead and select it, right click, and open for edit.
So once we've opened the survey import for edit, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to navigate to our figures. You're going to right click on your figures, and we're going to go down to an option for create break lines. When we create break lines, what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to add them to a certain surface.
We only have one surface to choose from. We're going to add them to our full development surface, and then we're going to look through these objects. So what you'll see is we have edge of pavement, flow line, sidewalk, top of curb, toe, and top.
So these are different figures that were created when we did our survey import, and they were defined as break lines. If you go to your figure prefix database like our Civ 201 here, and you manage your figure prefix database, what you'll see here is when we created this figure prefix database, we defined all of these figure prefixes as break lines. So what Civil 3 does when we tell it to create break lines is it looks back to this figure prefix database, and it looks to find any of the figure prefixes that have this box checked.
If we had a figure prefix that didn't have that box checked, it would not show up when we chose to create break lines. So I'm going to go ahead and hit cancel. I'm going to go back to figures.
I'm going to right click on figures. I'm going to choose create break lines, and then I'm going to make sure I have my full development chosen, and I'm going to leave all of these checked. So you have the option for unchecking or checking all.
They chose all checked because all of these objects were in fact break lines, and I'm looking down these, and I do in fact want to add all of these as break lines. So I want edge of pavement, flow line, sidewalk, top of curb, toe, and top. So I'm going to go ahead and click okay, and when I do that, Civil 3D has now selected all of those feature lines in or the figures in here, and they're adding it in as break lines.
Now when I'm adding these break lines in, I'm going to go ahead and define this as survey figures. I'm going to go ahead and drop down. I'm going to choose standard.
So because like I said before, I generally only work with standard break lines. Proximity, wall, from file, and non-destructive are less common, and I want these to behave normally as a standard break line. So I'm going to choose standard.
I am not going to weed any of these out because as you can see from the vertices, we don't have too many that are stacked on top of each other. I don't have many vertices that are inside of these top and toes. I don't have a lot of extra vertices along these curb lines, so I don't need to do any weeding factors.
Now I do, however, have some supplementing that I need to do. So I can do some supplementing along these sidewalk lines here because I only have a point here and a point here, and I may want Civil 3D to interpolate between those sidewalk lines. Same thing along this back of sidewalk here.
I have one point down at this end and one point down at this end, and I only have a few small points in here. So I'm going to go ahead and do supplementing factors of distance. I'm going to go ahead and say every 30 feet, and then I have some curves here that I want to approximate better.
So I'm not going to go with a 1. Like I said before, I tend to use 0.1 when I'm talking about my midordinate distances. Now I don't have any other curves other than these curb returns right here, so I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And when I do that, you'll notice that my contour lines updated, and I have a better definition of what this road actually looks like.
I have a better definition of what these sidewalk pieces look like. And if I zoom really close in, I actually have some really good definition of what my curbs look like. So I have my flow line, which is this blue line, and I have this top of curb, which is this red line here.
And so what you can see is that I have the street coming at a certain grade. It hits the edge of pavement. It drops down into the flow line, and then it hikes back up into the top of curb and comes across the sidewalk, and then it starts picking up these additional points over here.
So I really like how this looks with all these definitions. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to save, and then I will meet you in the next video. And we're going to look at this in three-dimensional view, and then we're going to start talking about what the 10 lines are, and I'm going to display them for you.
