civil 3d commercial grading segment 3

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ATP101 Commercial Grading Project Civil 3D

Segment 3

Date: December 26, 2005 Instructor: Danny Counts Level: Intermediate Category: Autodesk Civil 3D Web: www.AUGI.com



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Setting up work area We will begin by setting up the work area that makes it easier to develop our 3D grading. We will start by altering the Standard Surface style so that way it appears as a border in 2D and 3D. Then as we develop the finished floor elevations, it will be easier to see them rising up without the 3D TIN from the existing terrain in the way.

1. Ensure the Existing Grade Surface is set to the Standard Surface Style. Edit the Standard Surface Style by going to Settings tab of the toolspace and expanding the surface collection and also expanding the Surface Styles collection. Right click on the Standard Style and select Edit…

2. In the Surface Style – Standard dialog box, choose the Display tab and set the View Direction to 3D. In the area below, turn off all components except the Border as shown in Figure 1… then hit OK.

Figure 1

3. Also be sure to change the Proposed Surface style to Standard for the time being.



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Creating Finished Floor Elevation Labels In this example, we will create some dynamic labels that will update automatically as we alter the design. We are purposely creating a label style and adding these labels prior to finishing up the conceptual design so we can see how easy it is to compare the grading concept to the design criteria.

1. Go to Surfaces?Labels?Add Surface Labels… 2. From the Add Labels dialog, change the Label type to Spot Elevation and select Copy Current

Selection to copy the properties from the Standard style to your new style. See Figure 2…

Figure 2

3. On the Information tab, change the name to “Finished Floor Label” then switch to the Layout tab and select the ellipses button next to Text Contents as shown in Figure 3…



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Figure 3

4. Ensure the Text Component Editor looks like the following dialog shown in Figure 4. You will need to remove the current text in the window since it has a precision of 3 and you want a precision of 2 decimal places. Also add the “FF=” as a prefix and add a tick mark indicating feet as a suffix…then hit OK twice to get back to the Add Labels dialog box.

Figure 4



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5. Select the “Add” button and proceed to select the surface named Proposed Surface, then begin to add a Finished Floor elevation label inside of each of the building areas. The finished labels should look like the following in Figure 5…

Figure 5

6. To remove the Point Node dynamically from the entire drawing, simply go to the Settings tab of the Toolspace, and expand the collection as shown in Figure 6 and right click on the Standard Point Style and select Edit… Once in the Point Style Standard dialog box, select the Marker tab and select the second option from the left under custom marker style as shown in Figure 6… then hit OK.



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Figure 6

Creating Finished Floors When the grading tools don’t work as expected, you need to determine ways you can work around the limitations of the grading capabilities. Using the “Finished Floor” criteria set, unbeknownst to me prior to starting this class, is not working as expected. My work around was to take my original building curb perimeters and offset them 10’ in representing the horizontal location of the finished floor, then use the Elevation Editor under Grading to set the absolute finished floor elevation (which turns these into feature lines) then add those feature lines to the Proposed Surface. The final output is exactly the same intent had the grading tools worked properly.

1. Insert the buildings.dwg provided… 2. When determining a finished floor elevation, remember this is a conceptual grading plan where

things may be revised and designed more precisely later on. In this case, I will use the cursor to query the elevations of the Proposed Surface at the four corners of a given building and then approximate an elevation that is roughly about 0.25’ higher than the highest corner point. See Figure 7 to see the elevation feedback over the Proposed Surface… In figure 7, if the 1138.855



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represented the highest corner elevation, then I would se the Finished Floor using the next few tools to 1139.10 approximately…

Figure 7

3. Next go to Grading?Elevation Editor and select your first building finished floor which is the internal offset, select Yes to convert the entity to a feature line. You will then be prompted by the Grading Elevation Editor Palette. From the toolbar, select the Raise/Lower button as shown in Figure 8… then type in a value in the value editor of 1139.10 and hit Enter to set that value to all corners… then select the Green Check Mark to close the interface.



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Figure 8

4. To add this feature to the Proposed Surface, expand the collection under the Prospector tab in the toolspace for the Proposed Surface. Right click on the Breaklines area as shown in Figure 9 following by selecting the new finished floor. When prompted to add breaklines, just hit OK to the dia log and then select the finished floor. You will automatically see the contours update as shown in Figure 10… ideally, there should not be any contours inside of the building area.

Figure 9



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Figure 10

5. Proceed using the Elevation Editor to add an absolute elevation to each of the building pads, then add each of those breaklines to the Proposed Surface.

6. The finished product would look something like the following in Figure 11 provided you have applied a surface style that shows 3D Faces while in 3D with a shaded mode applied…



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Figure 11

Creating Daylight Lines In this case, Civil 3D has a difficult time creating daylight lines of complex shaped objects. My approach would be to generate a boundary that surrounds the buildings but is within the limits of the Proposed Surface. Then, I would use the Grading?Edit?Elevations from Surface tool to drape the boundary on the Proposed Surface. Then I would use the grading tools to grade out at a 2:1 or some other constant or variable slope until it hits the Existing Grade. You can get this to work if you break the boundary into a few to several segments. I would recommend that you consider getting this surface back into LDT to create the daylight line. If you know the exact location of the daylight line, you could use the same approach suggested in this paragraph, but drape of the Existing Grade surface and grade back up to the Proposed surface, although this will be just a challenging on the system. You will find creating daylight lines in LDT is much more reliable. All you need is the 3D Polyline, then you can add this 3D Poly into the surface just like you did when you added the building finished floors to the surface. In this case, insert the daylight drawing supplied and make sure it is exploded after you insert and then add the two breaklines supplied to the Proposed Surface using the same process as shown in Figure 9. Your resulting surface should look like the following in Figure 12…



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Figure 12

Calculating Earthwork and combining surfaces We will learn how to compute earthworks as well as recomputing volumes in case of a design change. Additionally, you may want to create a finished ground contour map that represents the combination of the Existing Grade and Proposed Surface.

1. Go to Surfaces?Utilities?Volumes and select the “Create new volume entry” button, then indicate the surface pair by selecting the Existing Grade as Base Surface and the Proposed Surface as the Comparison Surface. Then just pick a point anywhere in the white space for the volume to be calculated. See Figure 13…



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Figure 13

2. Right click on the Proposed Surface in the prospector and set it to Rebuild Automatic… 3. Move one of the building finished floors up 0.25 feet by using the Move command and pick any

start point with a displacement of @0,0,0.25 4. Notice how the Finished Floor Elevation automatically updates and the contours automatically

recalculate. 5. If you did not close the composite volumes palette previously, you can select the Recompute

Volumes icon to show the updated earthwork as shown in Figure 14…

Figure 14

6. To combine surfaces, use the AutoCAD Copy command to copy the Existing Grade surface by graphically selecting the surface and picking any start point followed by using a displacement of @0,0,0 then be sure to hit Escape



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**NOTE: Be sure to pick up the correct surface by selecting an appropriate contour of the Existing Grade surface

7. You will notice in your prospector that you have another surface called “Existing Grade (1)”, right-click on the surface in the Prospector and go to Properties, under the Information Tab, change the name to Final Surface and hit OK.

8. Make sure the Final Surface collection is expanded within the Prospector of the Civil 3D toolspace then right click on Edits and select Paste Surface as shown in Figure 15…

Figure 15

9. When prompted to choose a surface to paste, choose the Proposed Surface as shown in Figure 16…

Figure 16



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10. Finally, change the surface style for all surfaces (except Final Surface) to a surface style of Standard and ensure the Surface Style of Final Surface is “Borders and Contours”. You can do this through the Prospector. The result should be the following in Figure 16…

Figure 16

civil 3d commercial grading segment 3

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