Hey there ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the live stream welcome back to the live stream to civil3d.tv we are we have been getting more and more involved into gradings
into the gradings let me pull up my trusty notes I’ve got my chat window open just in case anybody wants to uh to chit chat about civil 3D but we’re going to be diving into greetings once again folks and um this live stream is solely for me to get reacquainted with some of the different features of civil 3D because I don’t know if you’re like me but I tend to forget a lot of things after a while if I’m not if I’m not using them regularly I tend to forget things let me make sure that my sound is good
just one moment
that’s one thing I need to be very
cognizant of here we go Probably sounds a little bit better now
be very very clear with my communication make sure I’m loud enough okay so I should be good there um yeah I’m just getting reacquainted with uh with some some of the features of civil 3D I hope people don’t get too bent out of shape in that a lot of these tutorials a lot of the the live training tends to be rather basic stuff you know um
yeah a lot of basic exercises so if you’re a beginner this stuff is perfect for you this is just free free training for you to be able to kind of learn a little bit more about the program if you’d like to learn more about civil 3D I do have a website called civil 3D Dot TV where all my live streams are going to be on this site especially in the free sessions as I go I’m just putting all the free sessions within the uh 2023 to 2024 I’m just putting them all right right there for you if you want to visit if you miss one you can you can see within a blog post I’ll get past the ads
yeah I mean here’s here we go here’s the the last live feed so um if you need if you’re looking for some like a full course if you’re I’ve got like 10 hours worth of free sessions here this is uh my this is my course from previous versions of civil 3D you know navigating the interface This Is 2020 to 2022. I’ve got everything here so uh it’s 10 hours worth of content so feel free to peruse that if need be but civil 3D Dot TV folks if you want to sign up for updates go ahead and sign up for that uh but uh but yeah everything’s right here so let’s go ahead and get started with kind of getting refreshed on the program okay right now I’m in the uh the grading Dash 2 drawing file all of these exercise files are actually within the help folder on your pre-existing uh pre-existing condition I don’t want to say that your existing installation of civil 3D has all of these exercise files so you might have to do some searching around for it but it should be within the help file folder so just to help you out with that okay let’s get to it
okay in the last stream we got into feature lines and this is just going to be a repeat of what I did with feature lines in the in the past streams so um I’m just getting into it once again so creating feature lines in this exercise you’ll use two different methods to create feature lines feature lines can be drawn either with straight or curved line segments or created from existing alignments or AutoCAD lines arcs polylines and 3D polylines okay let’s go ahead and we’ll run through this rather quickly because we’ve done it before in the previous Stream So create feature lines from AutoCAD objects Home tab got our Home tab right here within the draw panel we’re going to create a line create a line we’re going to go we’re going to go from here to here
then from here to here and press enter two different lines okay these are just regular lines
okay now we’re going to go to the create design panel then we’re going to go to the feature line drop down and keep track of my time here
okay create feature lines from objects we’re going to select these two lines
click ok
we’re going to stay in site one and then we’re going to name the feature lines
okay we are going to go ahead and click
we’re going to click ok
and we’ve got our feature line here and here
and we’re going to put in a name
we’re going to select both these feature lines make sure that a b c or an earned view here right click apply feature line names
and then right here we’re going to type in ABC
then okay so now we have abc1 and then we have abc2
okay next we can view this stuff within the sites collection site one feature lines and it’s all right in this section right here now you can create feature lines that are outside of a site but whenever you have feature lines that are within a site they can kind of be manipulated within a a particular site so when you have separate sites then you know depending on which feature lines are within each site they might not mess around with each other so I’m sure I probably confused you right there but uh I digress we’re pushing forward next we’re going to go to we’re going to draw a feature line
draw a feature line great feature line
we’re going to put this in site one as well the name check box we’re going to click that on and then we’re going to type in instead of feature we’re going to type in c d e f
we’re going to leave the next counter right here we went over some of this stuff in the previous stream in the style check box
that’s selected we’re going to check ditch
then we’re going to click ok now our command line is asking us to specify start point
we’ll click see the center of C and then for that elevation we’re going to type in 688.
next we’re going to go to D the center of d and then we’re going to put in a transition type in t for transition oops did I type oh that’s r t for transition then we’re going to go to E the center of E
type in we’re going to keep we’re going to press enter because it’s currently on transition then we’re going to go to f the center of f and then for this we’re going to choose a surface we’re going to choose the surface elevation you can see that it’s on Surface EG and the surface elevation is 712.066 we’ll accept this and press enter one more time and there you have it we have our ditch okay we can go into the elevation editor and we can kind of check this out if we wanted to 688 that’s good 7 12006 that’s the existing elevation so you can see just by the slope it’s a consistent transition to our existing grade surface so that’s how that works we’ll click out of that then we’ll move on to assigning feature line elevations hey YouTube index me we’re creating feature line excuse me we’re assigning feature line elevations okay so now we’re still in grading Dash 2
and we are moving on we’re Trucking we’re moving we’re moving
okay a signing feature line elevations in this exercise you’ll assign elevations to feature lines you created from AutoCAD lines in the previous exercise we’re going to be editing feature line elevations we’re going to be going to the modify tab modify right up here
then we have the edit elevations panel
stretches all the way out to about right here we’ve got all kinds of different options here we’re going to select the elevation editor like what we were in previously and we’re going to go to CDE and F we’ll select this
we’re going to kind of close this down a little bit just so we can see what we’re doing here come on there it is there it is okay
so now see how we have all these triangles that are showing up on our feature line you can see all these are showing up right here okay so at least you know where you’re at you know if you zoom out you can still see those triangles see that if you zoom in they shrink so that’s kind of nice
okay
well what we’re going to do is we’re going to zoom out and while we’re in this elevation editor we’re going to select a different feature line with this button select feature line parcel line or survey figure select this then we’ll select the line between a and b see that
okay we’re going to double click the elevation at
station zero which is at a
and we’re going to type in an elevation of 630. press enter
and that’s going to put
it’s going to put this feature line a few feet below the existing grade surface
it’s a few feet below the existing surface
we’re going to change the end point which is over here at B we’re going to change this to 690. press enter
fairly decent grade transition here
let’s see how this looks
yeah I can’t really see the feature line here here let me
do something like that
where’s my feature line for amb there it is
see where it is roughly
I select this can I change
some of this stuff no I don’t want to do that
okay let’s go back to the top
we’re going to change this back to that something like that see how I did that with uh the surface style if you don’t know this already you can change the surface style up here within the properties under style there’s all these different styles that we’ve got going on here all these different looks that you can change if you would like I’m going to leave this on borders Contours five and ten there we go okay next
I’m going to click this check box I’m back into my grading elevations editor
now what we’re going to do is we’re going to insert an elevation point on a feature line and the grading elevation editor
we’re going to click this to insert an elevation point
now you see
how I have like a little green circle that shows up on the line in between a and b
it’s a little tool tip that shows the station value and elevation of the point you see that yeah it shows the station elevation at that point are you roughly right about there that nice little tool tip
we’re going to move it to about the middle of the feature line roughly about right here
and then we get the insert pvi dialog box we can move the elevation point to a specific station if need be like what if we wanted it at I don’t know 250. and the elevation
will the elevation be I mean we can assign an elevation if we wanted to but that’s what it is currently well if I shift the L the station then the elevation might change but I’m not going to worry about that I’m just going to click OK whatever
okay then when we click on feature line a b you can see that that point shows up
and if we wanted to we can we can zoom in roughly to that existing grade 670 54 7. what is this what is this at
oh it’s a lot lower
what if we made this 674.57
or 670.5
okay
about over here existing grade is at 670
670.5 so yep the reason why uh the thing of it is this feature line doesn’t affect the existing grade surface because it’s not a break line you need to add you need to add the feature line as a break line in order to you know make some changes to the existing grade surface in fact we can do that right now if we want we can go into surfaces existing grade this might even be in the uh the notes Here but if I wanted to I can add a break line
click ok and you can see how the existing grade surface just changed just slightly okay that’s because it’s a break line
what I’m going to do is I’m going to select this I’m going to delete it don’t want this no more and then I’m going to right click then rebuild and it goes back to the way it was so that’s what you have to do with a feature line if you want to add it to a surface you need to add it as a brake line okay next
the next few steps you’ll drape feature line BC across the existing ground surface the command assigns an elevation to each vertex of the line okay we’re going to drape this feature line onto a surface
we’ll go up to the modify tab now let’s kind of scroll over a little bit let’s pan over to BC go to the modify tab
then over to the edit elevations panel once again elevations from surface
right here
elevations from surface we’re going to click this we’re going to use EG as our ex as our surface
we’re going to leave everything at its defaults then click ok then we’re going to select that feature line
okay you can see a bunch of stuff Happening Here
I’m just going to press enter to accept it
and then if we go to the elevation editor you can see that we’ve got a lot of stuff going on here a lot of stuff going on here each of these um if you want to call them pis or whatever PBIS
um these are where the the Train the triangulation points or the triangulation lines are crossing the line if I check this box and I go into existing grade surface surface properties and I change the style to was it triangles triangles and points click apply then okay see how you can see where all of the triangulation is crossing our feature line and you can see that we have essentially a point where it’s Crossing so that’s what’s that’s that’s how it’s determining that
okay next I could probably just undo that style change
there we go okay we’re back to where we were
and that’s essentially it let me see here the elevation editor displays the data for each elevation point along the feature line BC let’s bring that back up yeah these are all the elevations along the feature line that are draped onto our existing grade surface so that’s what’s going on there uh including in Salvation the distance grade to the next point a feature line on the surface like this can be useful can be a useful starting point for grading you can use controls along the top of the grading elevation Editor to add and delete elevation points and to adjust their elevations you can select multiple points within the table for group operations such as if you select this point then hold down shift then select this you can edit multiple points essentially you know you can raise them up or down or whatever or what have you um
or you can even flatten their elevations to the same value so you have multiple points that are selected you can select all of these and type in I don’t know 600. and all of them will change okay I’m going to undo that
there we go so that’s essentially it for assigning feature line elevations that’s that’s pretty nifty being able to drape a a feature line over an existing grade surface because you know if you’re looking to design a ditch or something like that you know it could be helpful
there’s more than one way to do everything right especially in civil 3D okay we’re roughly at about uh I don’t know about 20 25 minutes into the the live stream if you have any questions feel free to uh to put it put it within the chat um I’ll do my best to answer them uh but for right now what I’m gonna do is I want to grab something to drink so I’m just going to take a minute or two just for a break and I will be right back folks
all right and we are back that was a quick one right
a real quick one Aquafina okay so next
what’s next on the list here
okay we’re going to be creating a grading creating a grading in this exercise you will create a set of gradings called a grading group that form a runoff on the side of a of an embankment we’re going to create a grading group and specify grading creation settings and we’re currently within grading Dash 2 with the modifications we made from the previous exercise and then we’ll just go into the Home tab
the create design panel go under grading then grading creation tools
hopefully I’m not going too fast for uh for beginners I know there’s a lot of beginners that are that get into civil 3D and they get kind of confused by gratings and things like that but there are other more seasoned folks that are out there that that are looking to you know find all the bells and whistles within grading but this these live streams again they’re for beginners okay all right so we got our create design panel grading drop down grading creation tools and the grading creation tools toolbar we’re going to set the grading group this is this button right here set the grading group
okay we get our create grading group dialog box we’re going to name it ditch drainage
and we want to have automatic surface creation checked because this is going to create a separate surface a separate surface for our grading group and it’s kind of nice having just something that’s that’s separate from maybe your proposed um I don’t know maybe you have like several um ponds that you’re dealing with you know maybe you have different ponds maybe different Pond designs and it’s kind of nice having the automatic surface creation to where you have like a a separate surface that gets created that just doesn’t get um just put into maybe your proposed surface because maybe you want to make changes to your proposed surface so that’s what’s that’s what’s kind of nice about this setting but we’re gonna automatically create a surface
and we’re going to create a volume based surface
because we want a volume okay
and this is essentially our comparison surface right here EG
then we’re going to click ok
we get our create surface dialog box and it’s already named which is nice we can assign it a style if we want to style list let’s see if there’s a ditch in here
no ditch
no ditch
okay we’ll just leave it on standard click ok
then ok
the next thing that we’re going to do
is we’re going to select a criteria set
by clicking that button and remember when we when we created the ditch criteria set in PR in a previous stream so we select that then click ok and you can see within this drop down we have all three of the grading criterias that we created for our ditch and if you haven’t seen the the previous stream with this you know I think I did it like last week so um
we’re going to ensure that
yeah this is the one distance at negative six percent is selected then we’re going to select this drop down
we’ll expand this just a little bit more this is our criteria
and the style list we’re going to select ditch there it is
now it’s time to create the gradings and we do that by clicking this button here
okay now our command line is asking us to select the feature line we’re going to select a b
and we’re going to select above the feature line to select the grading side so we’re telling we’re basically telling civil 3D that we’re we’re going away up and away from uh from this feature line and you’ll see what I’m talking about in a second click over here the entire length yes we do want that
and now it’s asking us to specify a distance how far do we want to go with this grading we’re going to we’re going to keep the distance 10 feet I believe that’s even yep that’s even assigned right here in our grading criteria so it’s already specified but it is unlocked so if you want to change it you can go ahead and change it if need be so the distance is 10 I’m going to accept that and you can see what happens we get this little little graphic right here that shows us our grading uh uh I’m going to press escape to exit out of the command but whenever you have a grading if you’re new to civil 3D if you don’t know what a grading is if you see something kind of weird that has like a diamond shape in the middle of it that’s a grading plus you can also see by selecting this little symbol here and you can tell you can see that it’s a grading if I zoom out let’s see what happens if I zoom out and do a regen yeah it’ll still show up from way out here if I do a regen all you can still see that grading Diamond so that’s kind of nice if I do a regen all once again that diamond gets smaller
and here’s our this white line is our original feature line
uh display we’re just send it back okay just so you know I’m going to undo what I just did
when I if I’m trying to select my feature line
I’m when I click on it I’m getting the grading but I don’t want the grading I want the feature line if I right click
and select I’m going to send the grading to back okay now when I select that feature line oops
it’s not what I want
now it’s selecting the the tin surface I don’t want that send it back now it’s giving me the feature line
so I don’t know if I just confuse folks a little bit more but it is what it is it is what it is a little water break here water
okay how far out am I on this grading do you remember what that number was if I do a distance if I do a uh I’m gonna move this off to the side for a second
if I go to annotate linear and go from I don’t know here perpendicular to this line
it’s about 10 feet distance from here perpendicular
about 10 feet why is it not giving me that dimension
d a l line Dimension from here to here here we go there we go 10 feet that’s the distance that we went at negative six percent
okay next
in the next few steps you’ll create another grading from the target line of the first grading to the existing grade surface
okay so we’re gonna move our viewing window I guess to about right here
we’ll bring this back
and we’re going to create another grading but we’re going to change it
to grade two the existing grade surface and a four on one slope
that’s our criteria we’re grading to a surface that’s the target okay so we’re going to go ahead and click this to create a grading and the feature line we’re not going to select this the original feature line because whenever you create a grading it automatically this I don’t know however this line Looks on your screen but it’s kind of like a pink like a salmon colored line right here this is actually a feature line so the a grading object will create feature lines for you so we’re going to select this
and we’re gonna we’re going to apply to the entire length select yes
now for the cut slope it’s going based upon our criteria that we specified here four on one okay and that’s what it’s asking us right here cut slope four on one
and look at my notes Here we’re going to press enter to accept that then for fill it says four on one we’ll accept this and there we go
press escape to get out of the command and it’s grading in a four on one slope to our existing grade surface
okay so the grading is created this grading creates a 401 slope from the bottom of the ditch to the surface your results May differ from this elevation or this illustration but
yeah that’s essentially it folks for creating a grading
creating a grading let’s take a look at our object viewer
what does that look like
that’s interesting huh
that’s the top oops where am I going here where am I going
this object viewer is nice but to tell you the truth sometimes it’s kind of hard for me to navigate it’s kind of it’s a lot it feels a lot different than navigating just in the in the regular you know drawing window but there’s a way to there’s a way to look at this in 3D uh kind of like that
so you can see how things are changing around here
View
2D wireframe what if can I change this to
Shades of Gray
can’t really see it because I don’t think it’s been added to our surface wait a minute let’s check Am I Wrong was this added to
my Surface
I’m going to rebuild
surface properties definition
yeah I’m not seeing it here cancel out of that
well grading group here’s my ditch drainage surface
wait a minute no that’s not it
yeah here it is Ditch drainage that’s the surface that’s the that’s the ditch drainage surface that we just created with our grating
and if we wanted to we can go into the edits and we could paste the ditch drainage surface into our existing grade surface I can’t really do that not with existing if we created a proposed surface we could probably do that cannot paste grading surface to its Target surface yeah that’s right can’t do that okay next
next thing that we’re going to do oh here we go we have a message from uh from Javier thanks for all your videos do you know how to create benches with variable grades along slopes and down drains I’ve tried many times but without good results uh to tell you the truth I’d probably need more information on that so with with some of this stuff um I probably need to take a look at uh at what your uh what you’re talking about here because that does look looks a little complex for me to be honest with you Javier I don’t want to waste uh I don’t want to waste your time
uh I create benches with variable grades along slopes and down drains I tried many times but
variable grades yeah I apologize I I wish I could help you with with that um
do you know how to you know how to edit slopes right I’m assuming you you know how to edit slopes on feature lines
okay you know how to do that okay
for those of you that don’t I know this is a existing grading but uh existing
wait a minute
we can go in here and
edit your grade
right here on the Fly
okay next we’re going to be getting into editing gradings
foreign
in this exercise you’ll edit the elevation of a grading Baseline the grading adjusts to reflect the elevation change okay we’re going to mean we’re going to need to be getting into grading for
grading for
oh no no problem Javier I apologize that I’m I’m not able to help you out with that
I’m sure there’s a lot of people that watch that uh perhaps somebody uh might be able to help out Javier in the comments section on this video yeah if anybody knows how to help out help him out that would uh I’m sure he would be greatly appreciative
I’m gonna do a save as desktop okay grading Dash four
yeah no problem Javier hopefully somebody in the comments section can can help you out there’s a lot of a lot of intelligent people out there that uh that know how to solve problems like I said I mean I’m you know I I know enough about civil 3D I’m a designer by you know with my full-time job but I’m by no means I’m not an expert to be honest with you um so I try to be that’s why I try to you know refresh myself on the on the software with things that I’m I’m lacking in so hopefully the people that are just getting into learning civil 3D you know like the beginners you know that since I go slow and slow enough to where they’re they’re able to kind of digest what I’m talking about but I am I I don’t think I’m for the uh the advanced users to be honest with you okay so let me close this out
grading four
okay we’ve got a building pad over here
we’ve got a building pad
and the drawing contains a rectangular building pad graded to the surrounding surface at a three on one slope let’s this is probably the fill over here we go grading criteria surface at three on one slope it says right here in the criteria
okay we’re going to go into the modify tab modify
we’re going to click on our elevation editor now it’s asking us to select an object
we’re going to select the Baseline of our grading this rectangle
so it’s right here the surface style of the building pad grading has borders turned off borders turned off making it easier to select the Baseline otherwise the surface border would be on top of the Baseline it’s kind of similar to what I was dealing with with the uh with the ditch with the feature line because like when after I built the uh the grating then it that that grading object is on it’s actually on top of the uh the feature line so I had to send the uh the grading object to back and the surface to back in order to be able to select my feature line but in this instance it’s a little bit different okay elevation editor shows the following grading settings for each corner of the feature line in a clockwise Direction the starting point is the upper left corner okay right up here that’s this one
okay we’re gonna shift click
the third and fourth rows all of these
okay so three different points
I don’t think that’s right
I’ll select all of these
I’m going to change this to 7 30.
it looks like we got a nice cut right here now
okay the grade back and the grade ahead elevations have changed all to zero
we’re going to go into
a little bit different
a flattened dialog box
there’s a flattening command here that if I undo all of this
okay right now this feature line is irregular everything’s at different elevations
okay the first
hmm
shift click
the third and fourth rows third and fourth rows oops
yeah do that change that to 7 30.
okay
now select the first three rows in the table
and click flatten
like that
okay
and flatten this to I mean it’s already flattened though let’s go ahead and do it and see what happens
yeah if I select all of this
flatten
to a constant elevation
makes that 7 30. okay I’m gonna undo this
or if I select all of this
right here we have everything set to 7 30 with the exception of this 765.
click this button
what about constant grade what does that do
keeps everything at 7 30 constant grade okay undo that undo that
okay this might be something that we have to revisit on on the next stream because these instructions here are confusing me quite honestly but we’re roughly at about uh one one hour or so I know I’m going to get complaints from uh from Folks at the end of this stream on this uh editing the grading elevation you wasted my time I’m sorry man I’m learning just like you are so with these uh with these free these free sessions it’s just we’re learning you know as we go but until next time folks take care um and again if you have any questions I’ll do my best to uh to answer them like like Javier Javier he’s got a question if there’s an expert out there that can answer them leave the uh leave a comment in the uh in the comments section so uh but until next time take care and God bless and
