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posted 09/19/06 by Anthony Governanti Light up your world - adding 3D symbols to a design

This is a tip that I briefly explained on the Discussion Groups the other day, and I thought it was worth digging a little deeper into for clarification. Many users out there have begun to really adopt the "3d way" of thinking. They've started to use 3D views of their models to better understand, communicate, and check to see if there are problems with a design. I went over some of the techniques used to visualize a design in this weekly webcast, so I'll refer you to that for more detail on visualization in Civil 3D.


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The question that was posed in the discussion group was the need to add a 3D symbol of a light pole to a corridor design, and have these symbols show up at the proper elevation. I'll go through the steps I use to add 3D symbols to a road model below, but please note that this method can be applied to any type of design.

Establish your points.
First step is to create or group the points you want the 3D symbol to display on together. In this case, we don't have any points in the drawing to use, so we'll create them from an Alignment. The light poles for my design will be placed along the right hand lane of the road, using a 4 foot offset from the top of curb. I begin by creating an alignment from the top of curb feature line in my corridor.

- From the Corridor menu, select Utilities > Alignment from Corridor
- Select the back of curb feature line
- Name the alignment and assign styles as desired
- Check on the option for Creating a profile


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When creating the profile, sample from the finished ground surface from your design, in this case the corridor surface. This is how the points will pick up the correct Z elevations when we create them in the next step.

There are many ways to create these points, but in this case, we'll use the alignment as a reference, and use the measure command to create them at a certain interval along that alignment.

- From the Points menu, select Create Points
- Select the Measure Alignment command (third set of buttons, third down on the drop down menu)


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- When prompted, select the alignment, then choose the profile


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- Select the starting and ending station, then enter an offset of 4
- Enter an interval, I used 50 for this example
- Enter a description like LP for Light Pole (make sure to assign something here, as we'll use this description in the next step)
- Select enter to run through all the points until all are created.

Get a 3D Symbol
Many of you may already have the 3D symbol you want to use, but in my case, I need to find one before I can move on. Luckily, Civil 3D ships with a small library of 3D blocks (called MVBlocks) that I can quickly browse to find what I need. i do this using Design Center (that's right, I'm actually going to use an AutoCAD command - see you can teach a new dog old tricks).

- From the standard toolbar, open the Design Center
- Browse to [\install directory]\Autodesk Civil 3D 2007\Data\Symbols\MVBlocks\
- Select the Street Light folder
- Drag and drop the Light Pole 01.dwg from design center into the drawing
- Accept the defaults for insertion when prompted


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Now that we have the 3D block definition in the drawing, we can use this as a marker for our points.


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Assigning the symbol to your points
We'll use this new symbol as the marker for a new point style. There are many ways to create the style, but I'm going to do it from the Point Group Properties dialog, as it will save a couple steps. First we need to create a new point group that will collect the light pole points together.

- From the Prospector window, right click on Point Groups and select new
- Name the group appropriately, and then go to the include tab
- Use the Raw Description option, and enter the same description used above when creating the points, in my case LP
- Go to the Information tab, and set the label style to none
- Create a new Point Style from here, and name it Light Pole, or as appropriate
- Go to the Marker tab, select the option for Using an AutoCAD block
- Scroll the list of blocks, and select the 3D symbol, in my case I_MISC_LIGHTPOLE_M


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- Set the size options to use a fixed scale, and the orientation to Object
- Go to the Display tab, and make sure the marker is turned on in BOTH the 2D and 3D view directions
- Select Ok to save changes


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Now we have points that will use the new 3D symbol, and a point group to use to manage the points. You may notice the markers aren't aligned at every location as needed, so you can use the point group to edit the points and assign the proper rotation to each point. This is a little tedious, but once its done, you are all set.

Now when you move into a 3D view, you'll have the 3D symbol showing up, and its at the proper elevation because we created the points from the alignment and profile. We can now continue to create powerful visualizations with Civil 3D.


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Hope that sheds some light (pun intended thank you very much) on how to add 3D symbols to your Civil 3D models. Pretty cool huh? One might even be tempted to say that it is Wicked Cool Stuff.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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