In this video segment,
I'm going to go through the steps of importing a survey topography from a
DWG file that I have for a residential lot. In a related video,
I traced over this lot just using a CAD line and converting that to a
terrain perimeter. If you've paid for a survey,
and you get a printout something that's on your screen make sure you ask the
surveyor for the digital file,
which is typically a DWG file.
Let's go through the steps of importing that file and being able to generate the
site plan and the 3D for the terrain.
I have a new plan open and the first thing that I'm going to do as I import the
DWG is I'm going to change my plan view to the plot plan view
that way as I create new objects, they will come in on the right layer.
Then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change my toolbar
configuration to the terrain toolbar configuration underneath the file
menu. I'm going to come down to import,
and then I'm going to come down to import drawing DWG.
The program will open up the drawing import assistant.
We'll step through this dialog. First thing,
I'm going to do is I'm going to browse out to the folder where I have the DWG
file. Go ahead and select the DWG file.
Then a few things the program's going to ask me about convert lines with shared
endpoints. I'm going to check that it's going to merge those into polylines.
This may help me.
The next one is how would you like to handle CAD blocks that are not
referenced into the drawing? I'm going to select the bottom option down here.
Typically,
when you receive a DWG file from your surveyor or the engineer,
there are going to be a lot of layers. This one has a handful of layers.
You may need to ask your surveyor,
which layers are for the property boundary and which layers are
for the terrain elevation.
Some of the other layers are for trees and adjacent property,
you can import those. You can determine if you want to use them.
For this particular file,
the property boundary is pretty obvious in this case.
I'm going to come down and I'm going to convert that layer to the terrain
perimeter. As I scroll down, I'm looking for the contour major layer
and I'm going to convert this one to the elevation layer and I'll import all of
the other layers.
I may not know what these things are until I import them and then discover.
On this panel for layer mapping,
I want to make sure that I'm not going to map all these to a single layer but I
am going to map them by layer name.
I'm not going to import any of the layer attributes that may be associated
with the DWG file. Then on the bottom,
I'm going to go to the advanced layer mapping panel.
As you do this the first time,
it may not be obvious what some of these items are.
Other ones you can map to the different layers.
For the property boundary,
I'm going to come down and I'm going to map that to the terrain perimeter.
So I'm just going to slide down and find the terrain perimeter.
Then I'm going to do the exact same thing for the elevation data for the
major contours. I'll just map that. In this case,
I'll open up the panel and I'm going to map that to the primary contours.
If you open up this dialog, you can turn the layer on.
Notice it is not turned on or you can turn it on when you discover that those
contours aren't there.
Those are the only two objects that I'm going to map into specific layers.
There are others such as the trees,
if you wanted to map those into specific layers.
For the unit of measurement, I am going to import this and feet.
You can see the other settings and finish up the import.
The program has a warning where some of the CAD lines could not
be converted to the terrain perimeter.
Depending on your DWG file that you received
from the surveyor,
some of the connections may not be able to form a
closed polyline.
Let's take a look at the process to solve the warning issue that's going on with
the terrain perimeter. Close the dialog.
Then I'm going to open up the active layer display set.
You can see every single thing that remains highlighted is not turned
on with the layers.
So I'm going to actually turn on all the layers of those items that have been
imported. I'll go ahead and close the active layer display options panel.
Press the space bar and here are all the items that have been imported.
For the terrain perimeter, zoom in on one of the corners over here.
Many times when you see this situation, I've clicked on one of the lines here.
You may need to pull the line back and then reconnect it or click on
the diamond. I'll go ahead and zoom out.
You can see that by clicking on that diamond, it actually closed the polyline.
Let me press undo and I'll zoom into the other corner,
click on the line and you can see that it's already connected. So again,
if you import your terrain and you don't get a closed polyline and you get a
warning message like we saw earlier,
you may just click on one of the lines and pull it back and reconnect it.
Or as I did, I clicked on the diamond and it forced the connection.
The next thing I need to do is convert this polyline to a terrain perimeter.
On the import it didn't recognize the terrain because it wasn't a closed
polyline. While the perimeter is selected,
I'm going to come down into my lower edit menu.
I'm going to use the tool called convert polyline. In the terrain category,
it is to convert this back to the terrain perimeter.
Program will open up the terrain specification.
I'm going to accept all the automatic defaults and then I'm going to go ahead
and take a 3D overview and we'll take a look at the terrain that was
imported. In the 3D view, you can see the slope of the lot.
Let me just turn this over to my vector view so it's a little easier to see.
You can see that it imported the slope of the lot,
exactly the way that lot exists.
So using that import was a pretty quick way.
Let's go back into the plan view. Let me close the 3D view.
I want to make sure that this lot is rotated so that the far
left line is going up and down perpendicular.
I want to do this to draw my house walls so that they aren't at a strange angle.
The first thing I'm going to do in rotating,
this is I'm going to draw a north pointer.
North in this image actually goes straight up and down.
And then I want to rotate all of the layers that came in so that the lot
line in particular to this lot line is going straight up and down.
Let me begin with the north pointer.
You'll find this under the line tools and I'm just going to draw a north pointer
right in this area right here.
Press the space bar to get out of the selection mode,
click on the north pointer,
and I'm going to make it parallel to the line below it. Using the make parallel,
I'm going to come over pick up the line and now it's parallel.
And for this line,
you can see the selected line has a red highlight on it.
Let's go ahead and double click to open up this line.
On the selected line is a angle of
28.58 degrees.
If I rotate this straight up and down, subtract 90 degrees from that,
that ends up being 61.42 degrees.
I'm going to select everything and rotate at that amount.
So I'm going to press Ctrl + A on the keyboard (Command + A if you're on a Mac)
and then in the lower edit menu,
I'm going to use transform replicate and with the angle I'll come in
and put in 61.42. It's going to rotate everything.
It may look a little strange because it left the terrain contours without the
terrain being rebuilt. You can always either take a 3D view.
There is a rebuild operation where you can rebuild the terrain,
regenerate it,
and you can see that now the terrain contours that were generated have matched
after the rotation.
This is an easy way because I want to make sure that I'm drawing my walls
straight up and down in this area. One thing,
you can do to check and make sure you've done all the steps correctly.
As I zoom in on the bearing information,
you can see the line segment and the bearing degrees off to the side in
here that came in as text objects from the import, from the surveyor.
I'm going to click on the terrain perimeter, let's double click to open it up.
On the selected line, you can see the 155.82
and a few more decimals that matches the 155.83.
On the line style,
you can show the length and you can show the angle.
I'm going to turn both of those on. When I do this,
I want to make sure that I turn on the quadrant bearing and also decimal feet.
You'll find this setting underneath your default settings.
I'm going to click on the wrench. Underneath CAD,
I'm going to come down to the general CAD.
One of the things I can do is for the displayed line length,
click the define button and I'm going to change the units specifically into
feet. And then for the decimal places,
we'll round that up at two decimal places.
And then I'm going to switch the display line angle as quadrant
bearing. Let's check the coordinates, something doesn't quite look right.
So I'm just going to click on the text and I'm gonna move these out so that we
can easily see these. Click on this text object and slide this up.
The feet match, but the bearing line information does not match.
As I relook at the plot map,
I noticed when I first drew the north pointer,
it actually was not parallel with this line. It was straight up and down.
So I'm just going to rotate this the same amount that we did for the lot
initially. Then I'm going to come down into the transform replicate,
and I'm just going to type in the same value 61.42.
That should then match the bearing
line information exact,
according to the surveyors data that we received.
I'll press F6 on the keyboard.
You can see that all the layers that have come in are on a little interesting
color, and there's a lot of them on there.
I may import this a couple of times now that I know which of these layers like
the trees and the adjacent property. I might map those initially,
but you can go through and clean these up.
I've gone through those steps and cleaned up the site plan,
adjusted some of the layers and turned off some of the layers.
In this layout sheet,
you can see exactly what I've done with a little bit of work,
using the basis of the DWG file to import and get started.
Also use it for 3D that I can show to the client for their new lot.
That wraps up this video on importing a terrain DWG file to learn more,
see the built-in help file as well as our other videos. Thanks for watching.