Dive into the process of using the map check command in Civil 3D. This article offers a step-by-step guide, illustrating how to use this command for map check analysis in drawings, specifically focussing on property analysis.
Key Insights
- The map check command in Civil 3D is used for analyzing properties in a drawing. The process involves indicating a 'point of beginning', selecting labels, and ensuring they are oriented correctly based on their bearing inside the label.
- It's important to ensure that the labels on a property are drawn in the right orientation for the map check to work correctly. The 'reverse label' option can be utilized to change the direction in which your label is being drawn, or the orientation of the label on your segment.
- The map check command also allows users to view a 'closure report' which gives information about the error distance, error direction, and the area of the parcel. Civil 3D automatically creates an area label for any closed parcel segments, indicating a zero error distance closure.
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In this video we're going to go ahead and talk about how to use the map check command. So I'm going to do that by typing in the command map check.
So I'm going to type m-a-p-c-h-e-c-k for map check. I'm going to type enter and I'm going to have the map check window come up. We're going to be doing a map check analysis in the drawing and the way that you start a map check is you go ahead and go up to this button here and you select new map check.
So I'm going to click this button and Civil 3D is going to prompt me to enter a name of my map check. So I'm going to go ahead and do a map check on property 26. And so I'm going to type in prop 26 and I'm going to hit ENTER.
So from here Civil 3D is going to prompt me to select my point of beginning. I'm going to go ahead and go with the upper left corner of my parcel as my point of beginning and then I'm going to click and it gives me this marker as my point of beginning marker. Now Civil 3D is going to ask me to select a label, or it says clear or new.
So I already have my labels and I prefer to do a map check after I've labeled my parcels so that I can use these labels in doing my map check. So I'm going to go ahead and select this one here and what you'll notice is when I selected it Civil 3D gave me an option for selecting this label which reads north 90 zero west and 57 feet. Well inside of the drawing northwest is this direction over here.
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Now that is not my parcel 26. So there is a problem here in that the label was drafted from right to left, and I need that label drawn from left to right. So what I can go ahead and do here is I can escape out of my map check command prompt.
I can go ahead and select side one, click delete, and then close my map check window. So I was working with property 26 so I need to make sure that my labels are drawn in the orientation that I need them to be in order for my map check to work out. Now if I wanted my point of beginning to be here and I wanted to go clockwise around property 26, what I need to do is make sure that my labels read that direction as well.
So what I can do here is I can see I have northwest, which is not correct. I can't go from here this direction in northwest. So what I have to do is select the label go up into the contextual ribbon bar and select reverse label.
So, reverse label changes the direction or orientation in which your label is being drawn on your segment. So that's a way to change how your bearing is being read inside of a label in Civil 3D. So the other options you have inside of here are flip label so you can flip the top and bottom and then you can reset your label so you can reset it back to its original orientation.
So what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to click on reverse label again so I have northeast, then I'm going to read my next label, which says northeast as well so this is not correct. I'm not going to be going north I want to be going south so I'm going to select this I'm going to go ahead and select reverse label so that I have a south then I'm going to look at this northwest. That's correct; I want to go west over here then I'm going to go up here, and it's south. I don't want to go south from this corner I want to go back up to my point of beginning so I'm going to go ahead and select this label and I'm going to select reverse label.
So I'm going to escape back out again. I'm going to type map check again, and then I'm going to hit ENTER and so I can go back into my map check for prop 26 expand it out select my point of beginning expand it out then I can go ahead and go up here and choose new side. So from here it says select label again I can select this label and now it's drawing in the correct direction so I can select my next label it draws in the correct direction select the next label and select the next label. Now I have officially completed a map check for property 26.
I can escape out and I can see that I have four sides here which are all the sides of my parcel and I can see all of the information about these sides but I can also go and look at a closure report. So from here we have the options for our input view so inputting the data into the map check command and then we have our output view. If I change over to output view what you'll notice is that I have a closure summary so inside of here I have the options to understand what my error distance is and my error direction and what the area of my parcel is so this is information on your map check that you just did.
Now this parcel closes and we know it closes because we have an area label, and that's something that Civil 3D does anytime you have parcel segments that have closure—a zero-error distance closure—Civil 3D automatically creates this area label because it's a closed parcel inside of Civil 3D. Now if we had a parcel that did not close and we needed to give an error distance and an error direction for a closure report for a drawing that we were doing because not all parcels have 100% closure, it doesn't have a zero error distance. So I'm going to go ahead and navigate over to the right-hand side of my drawing. You do not have to do this; I am just going to show you what it looks like if you have a parcel that does not have closure, and you do a closure report or you do a map check on this. So I'm going to go ahead and drop a polyline. I'm going to click, click, and then I'm going to zoom in close, turn off my snaps, and get very close but not closing. I'm going to hit ENTER to escape out. When I zoom out, you'll notice it looks like it closes. But if I go to parcel and I create parcel from objects and I select the polyline that we have here and I hit ENTER, you'll and then I will choose to erase existing entities and leave all of the standard things inside Civil 3D. I'm going to go ahead and click okay. Now I have a parcel here but you'll notice Civil 3D has not created an area label, and that is because I don't have closure. And so this would give me an indication of needing to perform a map check to get my closure report. So I can go ahead and go to annotation. I can go to parcel labels, single segment. I can't do multiple segments because I don't have an area label to click on to do a multiple segment creation method. So I'm going to go ahead and go to single segment, select point on entity, I'm going to click around the outside edges going in the clockwise direction and I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER to escape out of my label command. I'm going to zoom in here to make sure that my directions make sense. I'm going to go southeast—yes, that makes sense. I'm going to go southwest—yes, that makes sense. I'm going to go northwest—yes, this makes sense, and I'm going to go northeast—yes, that makes sense. Anytime you're doing any kind of labeling or map checking or anything inside Civil 3D, it's always good practice to verify that the directions make sense before proceeding because if they don't make sense, if the directions don't add up to what you're expecting them to do, then you may have a problem as you start your map check command.
So I'm going to go ahead and go back into map check and I have my map check for property 26. I'm going to go ahead and create a new map check, which is going to ask me to enter a name for my map check. I'm going to type in closure because I want to check my closure here. I'm going to go ahead and choose my point of beginning. I'm going to turn my snaps back on, I'm going to snap to the end of my top line segment, then I'm going to select my labels. I'm going to select my labels in the direction that I created them so that they go around my parcel as I drew it. Then I'm going to go ahead and hit ENTER to get out of adding my sides, and I'm going to switch back over to my output view. When I switch over to my output view, what you're going to notice is that now I have an error distance and an error direction. And so what this does is it tells me that my error distance is 0.004 feet in this direction. So these are pieces of information that you need for doing traverse and closure reports. And so I wanted to show you what it looks like if you have a parcel that does not have closure and how you can get that error distance and direction information. So I'm going to go ahead and actually close out. If you don't want to keep your map checks, you can go ahead and go back into input, select the map check that you have, and then delete it out by clicking the delete button. I'm actually going to delete both because I don't need to have the map checks for these. And then I'm going to delete this out, I'm going to zoom back into where we were working before, I'm going to save my drawing, and then in the next video we're going to talk about adding tables into our drawing.
