In this video,
I'll create a sloped terrain using the terrain elevation tools and place a
retaining wall. In this sample plan,
I already have a terrain perimeter and have a split screen up so it will be easy
to see the changes to the terrain.
A few housekeeping things that I want to share with you before I actually start.
One, I already have my saved plan view on the plot plan. Also,
my toolbar configuration is using the terrain configuration to
give me access to all of the different terrain tools. With this configuration,
I am going to come over and I'm going to choose the terrain elevation tools.
In my tool palette, you'll see the different terrain elevations: point, line,
spline, region, and break.
The tools that I find easiest to use would be the elevation line as well as the
elevation region.
Those are the two tools that I'm going to focus on for the purpose of this
video. When you use an elevation line,
you will need to draw two different lines to generate a slope and changing
your terrain. With this tool,
I'm going to come over into the back of the lot,
and I'm going to draw a line just inside. Notice when I drew this line,
it's actually inside the terrain perimeter and it extends beyond the boundaries.
Otherwise, if I'm short of the boundary,
the terrain may not generate the way I intend it to be.
When I first drew this line, it's difficult to see,
but the zero feet it comes in at the relative value of the terrain
perimeter. This terrain perimeter is set to be at an automatic height.
I'm going to take the elevation line.
I'm going to draw one more line towards the bottom of the terrain. Again,
make sure that you exceed the boundary of the lot itself so that the
elevation information will span the entire lot.
For this elevation line that also came in at zero feet,
I'm going to double-click to open it up. And on the elevation panel,
I'm going to come in here and I'm going to put in a minus 36 feet to
generate a negative slope from the front to the back of the terrain.
You can see that the lot is now extremely sloped.
If you don't have a 3D view up, you may need to generate the terrain.
You can find that tool underneath the terrain tool, and specifically,
it is called build terrain.
That will regenerate after you've added any of the terrain elevation data.
The slope on this lot is pretty simple. It goes from top to bottom,
and it's sloping at 36 feet from the front to the back.
I want to create a terrain elevation region so that the house will
sit more on a flat area. To do that,
I'm going to come back into the elevation data and I'm going to use the tool
called elevation region. Again, on the outside of the terrain perimeter,
I'm going to come in and I'm going to draw this terrain region
just short of the front of the garage.
This is going to use an average value for the terrain calculation.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to double-click to open it up and you can see
the value in the elevation is using inches.
It's minus 222 and five sixteenths.
One of the things that I like to do is change the number style.
This is usually just temporarily.
I like to change the number style while I'm working with my terrain to use
decimal feet. When I'm back in the floor plan working with the walls,
I do set it back to the fractional feet and inches.
You can see that with the decimal feet, it's at a minus 18 feet.
I'm going to go ahead and change that to be minus 24 feet.
That will then adjust the terrain in that area.
I'm going to use one more elevation region. Now zoom in just a little bit,
right for the front of the garage, very close in here, one more area.
And for this one,
I'm going to open it up and I'm going to set this one to be minus 25 feet.
So that creates a small gradual area in here. And in the 3D view,
you can see the man door off to the garage is being cut by the terrain.
So slight adjustment in this. These are polyline objects,
which means you can shape them any way you want.
I'm going to use the break tool,
and I'm just going to create a small break inside of the garage area.
I'm going to pull that terrain back past the man door just slightly.
Let me fill my screen in both of these views and I want to talk a little bit
about creating a retaining wall as well as a terrain
wall. For the back of the house,
I want to create a nice smooth area right in here and create a retaining
wall that will provide some support for the fill behind it.
Over in the plan view,
let me come over and I'm going to click on the wall tool and you're going to see
a couple of tools. One is a straight terrain wall and then a retaining wall.
There's also curved versions of it.
Let's start with the terrain wall and I'm just going to click and drag all the
way through the design.
I probably will snap this to the edge of the terrain perimeter
when I'm finished. In this case,
the terrain wall actually follows the terrain.
Let me delete that and I'm going to draw it going down the terrain.
This would work a lot like the fence would. As you can see,
this kind of just follows the shape of the terrain versus cutting the
terrain, which is what the retaining wall is going to do.
So let me go ahead and delete that terrain wall. For the retaining wall,
in the floor plan view,
I'm going to come down and I'm going to use the retaining wall tool,
and I'm going to click and drag. In fact,
let's just snap to the terrain perimeter.
I'm going to click and snap to the other edge.
The retaining wall actually will cut and put a break in the terrain and you can
see that this is very abrupt. So what I'm going to do,
I'm going to use an elevation line.
I'm going to come over here and I'm going to draw an elevation line right on the
other side of the retaining wall.
And then I'm going to go ahead and open it up and I'm going to put in a value of
minus 18 feet to generate the terrain.
I might also take the terrain region that was used down for the house,
which is set at minus 24 feet.
Just pull that back so that it's flat in that region to generate the
terrain for the backyard. There are many tools to modify your terrain.
The main tools used for this model were the terrain lines and elevation regions.
You can learn more about terrains by watching our other videos and referring to
the built-in help file. Thanks for watching!