Grade a Site without a Surface

[Iceberg]

You can now convert your edge of pavement lines for islands, and bull-noses to Feature Lines, and derive their elevations from your Surface (either at this point if done en-mass). Then select your Feature Lines and use the content (right click) menu to add them to your second Surface as breaklines. You now have a proposed Surface that correctly hits all critical elevations, and 'drapes' your edge of pavement linework.

If at this point your draped edge of pavement linework is incorrect, you've either not received enough information from engineer (which you can now show them via Object Viewer; nuh uh, see here!)

This is exactly what I've been doing. So the answer is to use the software, but what I need to do is work with my engineers to find a better approach so that enough data is entered to generate the surface correctly.

Thanks guys for the input. I had a feeling that this was the correct way but wasn't sure if there was any work around that others might have done.

[cdatechguy]

Thought with Civil 3D you could easily update/modify a surface on a whim without having to recreate a surface after each change like we did with LDD? Perhaps your boss is still in LDD limbo....as I was told a lot not to create a finished surface...but I did anyway because it was faster than doing it manually. Perhaps that is why I was let go? But then again, all my projects were precise and never had issues.

Glad I work in Architecture now...

[BlackBox]

This is exactly what I've been doing. So the answer is to use the software, but what I need to do is work with my engineers to find a better approach so that enough data is entered to generate the surface correctly.

Thanks guys for the input. I had a feeling that this was the correct way but wasn't sure if there was any work around that others might have done.

The only other way you could model the parking lot 'more'? accurately, is to create an Alignment for each 'direction' the parking takes, and the required Profiles, then grade it using a Corridor where the Assembly used is located at the edge of pavement, and includes curb & pavement design, making sure that each Corridor Region's Assembly targets the adjacent Alignments... But that, to my mind, is still a bit more work up-front, despite being a bit less work down the road if you make drastic changes to the parking lot layout.

The other advantage here, is that you can also more easily generate sub-grade surface, etc. for volume calcs, etc. without having to raise/lower all of your Feature Lines (in a separate model?).

Good luck!

[maporter]

Wow! Definitely don't want to make light of your situation, but I thought I had problems just trying to get engineers to understand some of the quirks of C3D labels occasionally. All the advice you're being given here is exactly what I would do. I have some painful experience with trying to work with someone that thought drawing contour lines was how to design surfaces. Not a productive way to work with C3D.

Get really good at working with feature lines and you can probably create the surface faster than they can get their comments back to you on why it would take too long to do it correctly.
Good Luck.

[Civil Samurai]

Wow, I feel like I've been sent back a few years listening to the direction "management" is giving you! I agree with the approaches and advice you've been given and will say that if you don't have enough information to fill in every single spot elevation/slope needed on the final plan then you need to request more from the engineers. If you've been given all you need, utilize feature lines, surfaces and dynamic surface labels then there's absolutely no way it would take longer than using static polylines and text unless this is one of your first projects utilizing those tools? There is a bit of a learning curve to know how much or how little information to enter to get what you need for the end product. If this is a one-and-done design (when does THAT ever happen?) and if you're not familiar with the tools then MAYBE it'd be a close contest, otherwise game over LDD and it's mindset.

Good luck as you move forward. I don't know what your employment situation is but be careful not to get stuck at a firm that will not allow you to grow your C3D skilset as it can hurt you down the road.

Mike
Project Designer
Farnsworth Group, Inc.

[brent.moses391365]

Its a tough time dealing with issues like these. I was hired to help my company move forward with C3D but NONE of the Automated workflows have been incorporated into the design process since they adopted C3D four years ago! Each sheet is done piece by piece, simply for the fact "it doe not create a Quality product", and yet they still gripe their process is not efficient enough.

Best wishes!, you are not alone in this struggle!

[Steve.Mazza676743]

The problem is the design doesn't have enough detail in it to model the TINN correctly. I might get one spot shot for a curb island and then the island on the opposite side that's like 30 feet away wont have any spot grades. So I model my fault lines off of the spot shots I am given but its just not enough to model things correctly so I spend time fudging things to get a surface that looks good but might not actually be accurate.

Since I use a label style to label my Top of Curb and Pavement elevations I don't use COGO points. I use feature lines with elevations to determine those elevations.

Would adding these cogo points to my surface add any additional purpose that my feature lines are already doing?

If the design information given to you is not sufficient to build a TIN, then it's not sufficient to draw contours either. At least, not MEANINGFUL contours. You can draw lots of lines and make them look pretty and then find out later that they make no sense at all.

So that means, in your manual workflow, you are either filling in the blanks yourself, or you are leaving the blanks blank and the plan reviewers aren't catching that fact.

If you are filling in the blanks of the design in a manual workflow, then you can do it with the automatic tools as well. (I say automatic, but we all know that they require plenty of human direction.)

If someone gives you 5 spot shots for a parking lot, why not just put an AutoCAD point at each one, turn them into a surface, turn on the contours, and print it out for them to mark up the fine details they want? This would take, what, 20 minutes? If the spot shots are for the top of a curb island, just subtract the curb height and model the basic shape of the lot, and then add in the islands with feature lines after the shape and drainage is settled.

The contouring, spot labeling, and profiling features are the most bare-bones and simplest parts of Civil 3D and they replace the most tedious and mindless part of the job. So why would you avoid these parts of the software? I think there is a major information disconnect between your supervisor and the program capabilities.

It is true that the final product takes some extra work to make it look nice and crisp. It may not be worthwhile to model every little jog and smooth transition in the surface so you have perfect looking contours on your plan. If that is the case, the best workflow in my opinion is to model everything in Civil 3D first until you feel that the returns are diminishing. Then simply extract the contours and fix up the messy parts. This should really be along the lines of adding arcs and transitions - not moving contours. If you need to move contours around to get the result you want, then either your spot shots are input wrong, or you need additional points, or the designer didn't design what he or she thought. In which case, it's time to talk it over and do some QC.

[MMccall]

My workflow is similar to what others are doing. (which is what I came here looking for, How is everyone else doing this?) I use a 'design surface' to model the basic drainage pattern for the site and paste it to the 'final surface' (these surfaces are already in my template file and pasted together, they're just empty). The point elevations I get from engineering are added to the design surface as surface point edits. Feature lines are made from the curb face polylines, then stuck to the design surface for elevation and then pasted to the final surface. Grading off those feature lines adds the curb faces and infill fills the simple islands. (grading objects added to the final surface) At this point it goes back to engineering for a rough grading check. After that check, and revision, the final surface is further refined with additional spot elevations as needed, further grading objects, or even a polyline at an elevation to smooth out a jagged contour. Contours are labelled and spot grades a added a surface labels.

Drainage structures and pipes are added once the design grading surface is ready as some of the key spot elevations are the locations of those structures. Empty drainage networks are already in the template file with all their layer, labeling and surface reference in place. Sanitary sewer networks are handled the same way with an empty network setup in the template file. The network settings can only hold one set of default settings so I decided to put empty networks in the template.

So far its been working pretty well. Right now I'm waist deep in a 25 acre shopping center, 1000+ parking spaces, 58 drainage structures and 15 sanitary sewer manholes. My process is not as refined as I'd like it to be but its getting there. I have yet to venture into the pressure networks yet.

[remi678731]

Interesting thought. LDD had some processes that Civil3D has even thought of getting to. In some ways it was so much better C3D is a step back to the stone age