Hi. I'm Rami Tamimi.
In this video, I'm gonna show you to build a surface on AutoCad Civil 3D.
There are three different things that we're gonna go over for building surfaces.
Number one, creating point groups from our existing points in civil 3D. Number two,
mainly drawing in the break lines between points that we can add in to our surface,
and number three, talking about the different styles and representations that your surface
can have, whether you want to add in contours or TIN line. We'll go over all of that in this video.
To start, we're going to be importing data from our topographic survey. If you don't know how to
import your data, I've made a video describing how to do that and how to change the point style so
you have a customized label and symbol for every point. Click on the I in the corner, to watch
that video. And then come back here, and I'll show you how to use those points to create a surface.
As you can see here, I've brought in all the points from the field
and just to make sure that I'm in the right spot, I'm gonna go into the geolocation tab
and turn on the aerial map and it looks like, yeah, they're coming in where they should be. So
we're gonna start out by creating point groups of all the points that are in the project.
To do this, you're gonna go into the prospector tab, point groups, right click and select new. And
now you're gonna type in your first point group, which, for me, I'm gonna start with buildings.
I'm gonna go to Include. I'm gonna check with raw description matching and for buildings,
I use the code BLDG -- so I will type in BLDG. And it's always a good practice to put an asterisk
afterwards. Remember, asterisk means that there might be something after the raw description code.
So it's to also include those points. Let's say there's a number after it. It'll still include
it. Click OK. And now if I were to check in on our point group, we can see all of these points
that have raw descriptions of BLDG are in this point group. I'll repeat the process and I'll
add in another point group. Let's do concrete shots. Include C asterisk. OK. We'll go again.
Let's do the back of curb and we'll go to include. Raw description. BC. And I'm gonna go ahead and
fast forward here. I've added all of the point groups for my project. The reason we're creating
point groups is, we want to differentiate different groups for different points.
This will make it easier to distinguish points that have good elevations and points that have
bad elevations. We don't want to be including points that have bad elevations into our surface
because it'll ruin our surface. I'll show you what happens when we add all of the
points and especially the ones that have bad elevations and how we can ruin our surface.
After you've created all of your point groups, the next step is going to be to create break
lines between the points. Now I briefly went over this in a previous video about line work
and how to create different types of lines for your project. So to start drawing break lines,
what you're gonna need to do is go into the layers and select the layer that you want to work with.
Let's start with back of curb. Now I'm gonna move into the back of curb. And I'm gonna use this
imagery in the background, just to make sure I'm in the ballpark, I'm drawing in the right place.
So I'm gonna type in the command 3D poly. It's important to make sure that you're snapping
to your points. To do this, you're just gonna select the node option under the OSnap,
that's considered object snap. You can also press F3 on your keyboard and F3 will trigger
it on and off. So mine is on. I'm gonna go to this point. And I'm gonna select
all of the points where there is a back of curb. As you can see, I've got the back of curb in.
I'm gonna keep working around this project. All right. Now that I've finished the back
of curb, I'm gonna move in-out buildings. So we'll draw in all the building lines.
Okay. And then another one. All right. We got all the
buildings in. Next layer, center line. It's as simple as just picking the points. Concrete.
Now, I want to show you an example of drawing in lines but not wanting them to be included
in the surface. Here we're missing a line for the driveway and I really wish we had picked
up this line in the field. For this line, I don't want to use a 3D polyline. I may want to just use
a regular polyline. So I'm gonna just do PL and just draw in this polyline. The reason we don't
want to use a 3D polyline is because we don't know the elevation of this point right here.
We can't guess what the elevation is cause it was never shot in. So the only thing that we can do is
visually represent the location of this driveway. Using a 2D polyline or just a regular polyline,
will do that just fine. And again, I'm gonna do the same thing here. I'm just gonna draw
in using a regular polyline. These sidewalks and driveways. So these lines are polylines.
But then over here where I do have points, they are 3D polylines with
elevations. And I'm just gonna go ahead and keep drawing in these 3D polylines.
And I think with that, I have now drawn in all of the 3D polylines for our project. All right,
now that we've added all the lines, and break lines for our project,
the last thing to do is to create the surface. To do this, you're gonna start out by going
into the prospector tab and where it says surface, you're
gonna right click. And select create surface. I want to make sure that you have a TIN surface.
And let's go ahead and create a layer for our surface. I'm gonna click new. And I'm gonna name
this layer SURFACE. And click OK. Make sure that that's selected. OK. OK. And then you're gonna
name your surface -- "topo surface" -- OK. And now we have our topo surface. The next thing we
need to do is add information to our surface. So you're gonna open up topo surface. You're gonna
then open up definitions. And now you have all these options that you can add to your surface.
We're gonna start with point groups. Go ahead and click Add. And these are all the point groups
that we created earlier on. I'm gonna select the ones that are applicable for my project.
So these are the ones that I want and hit OK. And now I have all the point groups in the surface.
Next we're gonna need to add the break lines to our project. The easiest way to do this is
to select a few of the lines that you want to add. So I want to add the back of curb, the gutter, the
concrete sidewalk and the center line of the road. I'm gonna right click and select similar. What
select similar does is it selects the same exact type of line on the same type of layer. So if you
have a different type of line, it will not select it. Or, if you have a different type of layer,
it will not select that either. Notice how the 3D polylines from the buildings were not selected,
nor were the 2D polylines of the concrete selected. That's because I don't want them to
be a part of the surface. Once you've got those lines selected, you're gonna go to break lines.
Click add. For description you could just call this break lines. Doesn't really matter what
you write there. And then hit OK. And now there are break lines in our surface. Now, to see the
surface, you need to go into the style editor and turn on the display of different features of the
surface. To do this, you're gonna right click on topo surface and select edit surface style.
I like to turn on the points, the triangles, the border,
the major and the minor contours. You can select what kind of color you want.
And OK. And now our surface is present and we can see it. This like -- cyan and blue color are
the contour lines. The white triangles is the TIN line. TIN stands for triangular irregular
network, because we're creating a network of triangles using the points for our surface.
And the magenta color points are the points that are included inside of our surface.
Notice how all of these points that are in the surface are magenta but the building
points are not. I'll explain why you don't want to add all of the points to the surface. Now,
looking at the surface, there's definitely some cleanup for things to happen. The big and obvious
one is this point right here, which seems to be creating a giant hole in our surface. To give
you a better perspective, allow me to open the object viewer. Take a look at this now. You can
see a giant hole is being created for our surface. It's because this points elevation is incorrect.
So to fix this, you don't want to just delete this point. The reason you don't want to just
delete this point is because the horizontal coordinates of the point might be fine.
You just don't want to include it in your surface. If you select the surface, a new ribbon will pop
up called the TIN surface menu. If you go over to modify, edit surface, and delete point,
you can then delete points out of your surface. So I'm going to select this point and now that
point is gone and the surface is a lot cleaner. Another thing you might notice is that the TIN
lines are going all over the place, connecting in areas that they really shouldn't be connecting,
like between these two sidewalks. To fix this, you're going to need to delete the TIN lines.
Select the surface again. Go under edit surface and delete line. Now you can
delete these TIN lines out of the surface. So any time you see a large jump between points,
you're going to want to clean that up. That's not supposed to be happening. So that looks fine here.
All these points look okay. Usually this is gonna happen around the borders.
So again right here. Like that's bad. You don't want that. I'm going to delete this.
Generally this -- this looks okay now. Yeah, I can live with -- with this. Now, you may notice
that the contours sometimes look really jagged and just very pointy and not very clean. To fix this,
you're going to right click. Click on edit surface styles. And under the contour tab, you're going
to come to contour smoothing, go to true, and then I like to put this all the way at the max
level. So now my contours are smooth. In this menu, you can also change the contour intervals.
If you like one foot contours, you can do one foot for minor, and five foot for major. Maybe
you want two foot contours with ten foot at major. All depends on what your kind of style
is. I'm gonna keep mine at one. Hit OK. As you can see, now the contours look a lot smoother.
Something else that looks really strange is how it's coming back and forth. When really this
should just be a connected line. What you can do to fix this is swap the edges of these TIN lines.
Select the TIN. Go to edit surface and swap edge. Now you can click on some of these lines and
will clean up the contours so they look a little more presentable. I'm just gonna go through here
and -- I don't like how this is coming out. So yeah, that looks more like how it should be. This.
OK. That looks better. Come up here, take a look. I can clean this up a little bit. OK. That looks
good. OK. And I think that looks to be pretty good. I like that more. Now the reason why I made
you categorize your points into point groups and not just add them all at once, was, your
surface was gonna need a lot more cleanup to do. Let me show you what it would have looked like
if you just add all the points at once. If we just go to point groups, add, and I just select
all points. You're gonna see a crazy network of contour lines that are coming in at the wrong
area. The border is extended really far out and it just doesn't look right. It creates a lot more
work for you to do. Whereas if you just categorize your points into point groups, you save a lot more
time in cleaning up. Look, I cleaned this up in a couple of minutes. Whereas if we did it like this,
it would probably take over an hour. Organizing your work and keeping your points categorized,
properly, will save you so much time in cleanup work. Once you're satisfied with how your surface
looks, you can then select the surface, and turn off some of these layers. I'm gonna turn
off the points, the triangles and the borders. So I'm only gonna leave the contour lines and
I'm gonna go ahead and add some labels to my contours. So I'm gonna go to the annotate tab,
and I'm gonna click on "add labels." The feature is a surface. The label type is a contour single.
Click OK add and then I can go in here and just click on random spots. Add in contours.
I can then change how these contours look but for now, I'm just gonna add in a bunch of labels to my
contours in my drawing. Okay great. And that's it. That is how you can create a surface using your