Discover the essentials of executing surface analyses in Civil 3D, with a detailed exploration of how to navigate the tool space, select appropriate surface properties, and perform various types of analysis. Learn how to customize your analysis with different parameters, color schemes, and ranges for a more detailed and tailored understanding of your data.
Key Insights
- The article provides a thorough look at how to perform surface analyses in Civil 3D, including elevation analysis, contours, directions, slopes, slope arrows, user-defined contours, and watersheds. Each type of analysis allows for a different perspective and understanding of the surface data.
- Customization is highlighted as a crucial part of the analysis process. Users can set specific ranges or parameters, choose different color schemes, and modify display styles to suit their needs and preferences. This gives a more granular view of the data and allows for a more precise interpretation.
- The article also underscores the importance of understanding and setting correct parameters for specific analyses. It emphasizes the utility of slope analyses in general workflows and the need to set appropriate minimum and maximum slopes for accurate results.
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In this video, we're going to start talking about surface analyses. So, to do that, I'm going to go ahead and zoom out so that I can see my entire surface.
Then, I'm going to go ahead and navigate over to the Toolspace, Prospector tab, Full Development Surface. I'm going to right-click and select Surface Properties. When I do that, we have the third tab over, the Analysis tab that we're going to be dealing with here.
When I click on the Analysis tab, what we have inside of this window is the type of analysis we're going to do and what the legend for that analysis is going to look like. So, a style for the legend. Then, we have the ranges for elevation, followed by the range details for the analysis that we're going to do.
We also have this preview window, so you can check or uncheck it for the preview window. And then, we have our analysis types. We have elevation analysis, contours, directions, slopes, slope arrows, user-defined contours, and watersheds.
Each of these has different types of parameters that go into them. So, you can do an analysis of what different contours are. If you select an analysis and then you select a range, so if I selected five ranges and then I hit this down arrow, what Civil 3D is going to do is it's going to create a set of ranges, and then I will set my minimum elevation and my maximum elevation, and it will color the contours that fall within these ranges in specific colors that we have set here.
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So, from there, you have the options for directions. So, this is basically directions on slopes. We can go ahead and hit down for eight ranges, and you'll notice that the arrows will be colored based on their directions.
So, anything between north 02039 east and south 83621 east will be colored red and so on down these ranges. So, moving on from there, we have elevations. So, similar to contours, elevations are coloring specific contours.
Elevations are going to be shading in areas. We're going to go ahead and drop down a number of ranges here, and we're going to have basically a heat map of elevations. We have our minimum elevation of 210 up to a maximum elevation of 234.464, which is going to be colored in this blue color.
And so, you can go ahead and select these colors and change them as you see fit. These coloring schemes are actually controlled by our surface styles. If I went ahead and hit cancel here and I jumped back into my surface properties, I guess I didn't have to hit cancel.
I could have gone to information. So, I go to information. I go to 210 background.
If I go in here and I go to edit current selection and I go to analysis and I look into my elevations, what you're going to see here is the range color scheme. It has set as blues. So, that's the reason why those blues showed up when I selected my elevation ranges.
If I went down here, I could do blues, greens, hydro land, pastels, rainbow, and reds. So, these are preset range color schemes that come inside Civil 3D. So, just for an example, I'm going to go ahead and choose a new one.
I'm going to choose 'land, ' and then I'm going to go ahead and hit apply and click OK. And so, when I go back over to my analysis tab and I drop down my elevations and I return an eight value for my number of ranges, then what I get now is a different color scheme for elevations. So, these are important because you can modify them for the predefined display styles, or you can go ahead and just click and change however you want to do them.
So, moving on from elevations, we have slopes. This is a very common analysis that I like to do in my general workflows and day-to-day work career: I do lots and lots of slope analyses. So, what you're going to do here is drop down and select slopes.
You're going to go ahead and choose the number of ranges that you want to have. So, oftentimes when you're doing a slope analysis, you will have a set of ranges. You're going to have like zero to five, five to 15,15 to 30, and then 30 to whatever your max slope is or whatever a municipality would give you that information.
So, you would set it to, let's say, something like five ranges and you would select down. You could choose the colors. If you are required to do set colors, or you let it do whatever colors Civil 3D gives you, you can then also specify different colors.
If you want to have less than a gradation like this, say you want to have specific colors for specific elevations, then you could go ahead and set those. So again, you set your minimum slope, your maximum slope, and then anything inside of that range would be colored a specific color. So, moving on from here, we have slope arrows.
So, slope arrows are like slopes, except they display arrows instead of shading in regions. Then, you have user-defined contours. You're going to go ahead and add in some ranges, hit down.
You specify a specific elevation, and Civil 3D will draw a contour at that elevation. So, what we're going to go ahead and do next is watersheds. So, watersheds are different.
If you're doing a watershed analysis, you first need to draw in those watersheds. So, it's telling you to merge depressions into single drain targets when the minimum average depth is less than a set value, and then you can go ahead and hit ENTER. And what it does is give you areas with that minimum depth and specify these specific regions in your watershed analysis.
So, it's going to give you regions based on boundary points that it draws into your surface. When we're ready, we can go ahead and apply an analysis and show it in our drawing. But first, we're going to have to set our parameters for a specific analysis, and we'll do that in the next video.
