Civil 3D How To

Content Example

Below is a multiple page example of some of the How to informaiton from a typical section of our national recognized CAD Pilot Jump School courseware.

01_Grading Feature

Grading Feature

Grading features in Civil3D really have three distinct parts:

Grading Groups

ü A named collection of Grading Features that interact with each other
ü A Grading Group can produce a self contained surface.
ü Grading Groups can compute volumes
Gradings

ü A named Feature that ties a selected Grading Criteria Style and user supplied properties to the spatial control supplied by a Grading Feature Line
ü A Grading effectively contains a starting Grading Feature Line, and ending Grading Feature Line and breaklines that connect them.
Note that this data contains all the information necessary to produce a surface.
ü If you explode a Grading you get 3Dline and 3Dpolyline AutoCAD primitives – breaklines.
Grading Feature Lines

ü The originating horizontal and vertical control (spatial geometry) for a Grading
Grading features (“gradings”) are collected together into interactive Grading Groups. This is different from how Grading objects behave in Land Desktop. Each Grading object in LDT is completely independent.

Gradings inside a Group recognize the properties of their neighbors in the Grading Group.

For example: Three separate Gradings that make up a curb (the face, top and back of a curb) can be tied together into a Grading Group. Often the collection of grading features in a Grading Group are created one after the other:

1)   Build the face from a Grading Feature Line
2)   Create the top from the results (a Grading Feature Line) of the face creation
3)   Create the back from the results of the top creation

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posted by: Tench Tilghman
02_Grading Creation Process

The Grading Creation Process

The Grading Creation Process is fairly straight forward. As long as you recognize the limitations of the Features and do not push their limits too hard you can produce decent results in less time than in LDT.

1)    Create a Grading Group container to hold the Grading(s)
Optionally provide a target surface
2)    Create a Grading Feature Line to produce the Horizontal and Vertical starting control
You can employ the results (a Grading Feature Line) of an exiting Grading.
3)    Select a Grading Criteria Style and apply in to all of part of the Grading Feature Line
4)    An entire or partial Grading is produced
5)    Edit the Grading Feature line or the user input to the Grading Criteria Style you applied
6)    Optionally produce a dependent surface that includes all the Gradings in the Grading Group
7)    Optionally create a Detached (independent) surface from the Grading Group
8)    Paste the new independent surface into a copy of the existing surface to modify the surface
9)    Repeat until done

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posted by: Tench Tilghman

Courseware Examples

Styles and Settings

What you need to know about Styles and Settings in AutoCAD Civil 3D

The Big Ten

The most important interface tools in the AutoCAD Civil 3D

What is the Sheet Set Manager

The Sheet Set Manager is important to AutoCAD Civil 3D and you

Land Desktop or Civil 3D

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Why is Civil 3D so different from Land Desktop?

The question often carries the implication that Civil 3D is too different.
Software is only a tool. No more, no less. But wow do we love our familiar tools! They make us feel skilled. Our skill plus the tools produce the work we get paid for. This is a powerful emotional and financial feedback loop. This both good news bad news. Our known kinethetic skill makes us productive today and more resistant to new kinethetic skills.
Over a decade ago we coined the term, "The Competency Effect" to describe it. Modern scientific study backs this up. Simply put, Civil 3D has different PATTERNS than Land Desktop.

Civil 3D is different from LDT because it is a faster, easier, and fundamentally a better civil engineering tool than Land Desktop. To accomplish that, Civil 3D MUST be different. How is does it really doesn't matter all that much but the significant difference is what is called the Dynamic Model.

"Civil 3D is model building and LDT is paper pushing."

In LDT, nothing talks to anything else and you must repeat processes continually to update, check, and validate your work. At some point you decide enough is enough. Then you produce sheet drawings you must manually redline, edit, and push out the door. Lots of people spend lots of man-hours editing linework and basic annotation in LDT to get it "right". How many niffty macros and lisp tools do you have to help you do your job?

Civil 3D produces the line work, annotation, and even the plotted sheets as a product of the model building process. Model building is a set of parallel processes not the more linear process that LDT and ACAD employ. The new skill and experience you need to do work in parallel sucessfully is how to add, edit, slice, dice, and manage that model. These are new PATTERNS.

A good set of templates with suitable Styles does the output work for you and should help you also perform quality assurance while you work. What things look like shouldn't be the issue. Good design should be.

Software tools can make the process of Civil Engineering design and documentation easier, faster, and simpler. But Civil Engineering is not simple or particularly easy. Thank goodness. We get paid.

Why is it so hard to get Civil 3D working?

It is easy to see from almost any realistic and comparative demostration that Civil 3D is much faster, more powerful, and more flexible than, not only Land Desktop and AutoCAD, but any other civiil design software currently available.

Why is this show-stopping, super-software apparently just sitting there?

Here's the technical term - "Discontinuous Innovation". On our Famous Jumps page we feature a number of short videos that feature physical and engineering examples of it.

In a lot of places Civil 3D is not just sitting there, but those organization's aren't going to advertize the fact. They may be still in training, but they are getting there. Simply put, if you can do twice the work in half the time, you have a huge competitive advantage.

Implementing Civil 3D is not without challenges.

Civil 3D does not work like Land Desktop, but principals, engineers, IT staff, CAD Managers, and CAD Pilots all hope and think it should to varying degrees. Model based software challenges everyone in the organization to change their personal work. Exactly how we should change that work is part of the problem.

Most organizations have a decade or more of customization and implementation skill and experience buried into thier ACAD/LDT implementations. In addition to these status quo organizational investments (both emotional and economic), the scope and depth of detail possible in Civil 3D customization is both larger and more complex by orders of magnitude. Too much choice by itself is overwhelming.

Model-based, object orientated software is built to be used not experimented with and customized by the inexperienced on-the fly. Simply put, Civil 3D will blow-up, crash and die much more often while you build and edit Styles than it ever will just doing the work with a finished set of Styles. Customizing the software and using the software are substantially more different than they were in ACAD/LDT. With ACAD/LDT we customized parts. In Civil 3D, we customize interconnected systems.

Content Example

01_Grading Feature

02_Grading Creation Process

The Grading Creation Process