Wicked Cool Stuff
Dominick Gallegos, Civil 3D Technical Marketing Manager for Autodesk, shares his unique perspective and ideas on the functionality and use of Civil 3D for a range of different project types.
About DominickLatest Post
- posted 02/08/07 by Anthony Governanti Site Topology Part 3; Managing Sites
- I've been banging away on a site design these last couple of days, and have come accross a couple tips that I hope will help you when you are using the feature line and grading layout tools in Civil 3D.
The first tip is on using a pretty cool feature line editing tools that will make your life as a designer a lot easier.
Set grade between points:
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This command allows you to specify a point on a feature line to start, then a second point to define a range on the line that you want to grade. Then you can either project a slope, grade, or elevation difference between the two points. Really handy if you need a feature line to be a grade line, say the bottom of ditch, or in this case, a swale that runs on the outside of a parking lot.
Here we have the grading group selection dialog. If you don't have a grading group defined, you'll be prompted to create one first. Once here, you can switch to a different site, and select a different grading group, thus making its site current.
Now that I have the grading site current, I can use the editing tools on the desired feature lines (yellow line below).
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Here we see that I'm trying to use a feature line editing command on the yellow line, but the command will only recognize the green line, which is in the current site.
So how do we change the current site? Well this is where its a little tricky, or at least not intuitive in my mind. We need to use the grading group selection dialog from the Grading layout toolbar. This allows us to select a new "current" grading group, which by default sets the site current as well.
Setting the current site:
So you may remember from my other posts about site topology that you need to keep feature lines and grading groups separated into different sites if you want things to play nicely together. Once you've adopted this practice, you may run into a situation like I did that took a little hunting to figure out.
Essentially I had two sites for my site design; a Reference site and a Grading site. I used the reference site to collect and manage the feature lines and grading groups I used to crate a reference surface that I use to grade the rest of my site. The grading site was just that, a site to collect the actual grading groups and feature lines that will make up my design.
So here is the situation - I'm working away with my feature lines for my reference site, and then I want to edit one of the feature lines for my grading. When I go to select one of the grading feature lines with an editing tool, they aren't selectable. This is because my reference site is still current.
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So I hope that helps you all out hen working through a site design using both feature lines and grading groups.
Till next time,
Cheers,
AG