Chapter 17 – AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 Essentials – The Essentials and Beyond

hello my name is Eric Chappell author of
autocad civil3d 2013 essentials and this
is the additional exercise for Chapter
17 this is a really great exercise
because here we're going to see the
power of civil3d really come together we
have designed alignments and profiles
and corridors we have laid out lots and
we've created grading along those lots
we've even graded ponds and really have
a complete model of our design even the
pipes have been created and all of this
has been linked together into one smart
model that civil3d has been tracking and
managing all along and now that we have
all of this in place we're going to take
a look at the earthwork balance of the
project and actually you know in reality
we would have done this a long time ago
and as you're going to see in a moment
we're pretty far out of balance so let
me just show you that I'm going to
create us or a volume 10 volume surface
using the volumes dashboard and I'm
going to call it volume check and for
the style I don't need to see this
surface I just I'm just interested in
its analysis data base surface will be
eg and comparison surface will be FG
final now I do want to point out that an
earthwork a complete and thorough
earthwork analysis is more detailed than
just EG versus FG and if you're not an
experienced designer you will learn that
eventually but there's you have to take
into account the depth of pavement you
have to take into account top soil you
have to take into account unsuitable
material in the project
I don't want do too I don't want to
oversimplify the process that goes into
doing what we're about to do but in the
interest of time and learning the
material we are going to do an e G - FG
comparison so I'll okay that and after
it crunches the numbers we see that
we're way in the fill side you can see
the graph shows a lot of green and we're
76,000 yards in fill alright so as it is
right now if we
to build this project right now we would
have to have 76,000 cubic yards of
material brought in from a borrow site
and that's going to be really expensive
and not something that we want to do so
our job as designers is to get this
balanced out and that's one of our most
important jobs because balancing that
earth work is really going to reduce the
cost for the project it's going to
reduce the environmental impact as well
which is really important so I'm going
to close down my volume's dashboard and
you know let's think about what we have
built here we've we've drawn alignments
and profiles and built corridors off of
those so a really quick way that I can
get less fill and more cut out of this
project is if I push the profiles down
it's also going to push the corridors
down so I see right away when I look at
the Jordan court profile that here's my
design and there is a good bit of it
above the existing profile here and
that's generating a lot of fill so right
off the bat I'm going to grab this
profile and pull it down and what's
going to happen is my corridor is set to
rebuild automatic it's going to rebuild
automatically it's one of the surfaces
that contributes to my FG final surface
so that's going to trigger an update of
that surface and everything pretty much
drops down from here to down here
somewhere so we just severely drop this
road in fact if we look at the side
slopes we can really see that drop here
all right and if we look at the lot
lines we can see that there are some
very steep slopes in front of these Lots
that you know because the the building
pads are not dynamic those stayed right
where we put them while the road has
been dropped down significantly okay so
we look a little further we see another
opportunity to drop that profile down
here on Madison Lane you know so the
bottom two-thirds of Madison Lane is
being dropped down now if you take a
look at the pipes you'll notice that
they the
of the structures drop down but the
Pipestone we would have to eventually go
in and and get the pipes adjusted but
the structures have been adjusted so we
were at seventy six thousand cubic yards
of fill let's see what we're at now I'm
going to click the volumes dashboard
tells me I'm out of date so I'll re
rebuild it here and now we're at sixty
one thousand so that's a pretty good
drop but we still have a long way to go
let's not forget we also have some of
these building pads that they stayed up
high while we dropped the road down so
to get a sense of where those areas are
where where others where are these
slopes really steep
we'll use a trick that we learned a few
earlier in the chapter we're going to
use a surface style that tells us a
story about the slope so I'm going to
change my surface down to slope banding
to D and now all of a sudden we start to
see all these red and orange areas that
are steeper than they should be so I'm
going to use display order to send that
to the back and I'm going to pick the
building pads that have the orange or
red in the front indicating that these
front yards are too steep for driveways
and they're right where I'd expect them
to be along the lowered portions of
Jordan court and Madison Lane all right
so what I can do now with those selected
I can use my feature line tools right
click and say raise lower and I'm going
to drop them down to feet - - again
everything set to rebuild automatic so
it's all going to update automatically
and we should see these colors change
and it looks like we didn't quite lower
them enough there's still a little bit
of orange there or unless I went too far
and maybe it should have been one foot
but let's just hope that I need to go a
little further down so I'm going to grab
some of these that still have orange in
the front yard and lower them down a
little more so let's go another foot
all right so I'm getting a little better
each time so now if I check my volumes
dashboard I was I think it's 61 and now
I'm down to 52 so with each change I'm
getting closer and closer to a balance
so maybe I'll try another change maybe
we can make this low point here a bit
lower to really force you know drainage
down into that low point but also create
some additional cut for our project
right now the corridor is rebuilding and
that was that pause that we saw and you
know maybe we can lower Logan Court a
little bit of course we've got
intersections going on there so that's
already been taken care of for us but
you know what are some other areas that
we can now we can cut down a little bit
here we're a little above existing
ground so you know let's drop this down
a bit and this is what you know design
is all about it's going in and making
decisions about where to make changes
based on your experience as a designer
and your knowledge of the technical
aspects of it and let's see what that
did for our volumes I think we're at 52
before now we're down to 46 still got a
good ways to go but if we look at our
our orange in red here we've got a fair
amount of that to address as well so as
we continue to lower these building pads
down and make some of the orange and red
go away we're also going to be improving
our earthwork numbers at the same time
our end goal is to get it to as close to
zero as we can but we'll never get it
perfectly now another part of this
exercise is to do some labeling so we
want to take care of that next so the
idea here may be that you know it's part
of our local requirements to show the
driveways to the front yard slopes
because maybe in this county or in this
particular community they want to keep
the slopes of the front yards between
say 5 and 1% to make nice flat front
yards so you can see we've already
created some labels
for the first few lots and we can
actually just copy these labels to the
other Lots
we don't even need to use the add labels
command we can copy them and this is
going to tell us you know where we've
got issues it's also going to tell our
reviewers where we've got issues and of
course you know if our maximum slope in
the front yard is 5% we're going to need
to address some of these before we turn
it in or we could say you know what
we're actually planning on putting our
driveway over here let's say our maximum
slope is 10% there were at 7.7 so we can
say to the county or whatever the review
agency is this is where our driveways
going to be in this area same thing here
now in this area we've got some problems
so we're going to need to lower this
building pad down and I can use my raise
lower command and maybe drop it down a
foot that should give me some more green
area I can move this label out here and
show the review agency that we've got
adequate flat area in the front yard do
the same thing for this building pad so
you can see that the labels are not only
just a good annotation tool they're a
good design tool as well now if we
needed to create the labels from scratch
we didn't have other ones to copy from
we can just use the add labels command
and say we're labeling a surface slope %
I'll click the Add button pick my
surface and I'd like to do a one point
label because I want it to point in the
downhill direction and that's all there
is to it so the slope label requirement
for that exercises is pretty simple so
we've adjusted the road profiles which
has rebuilt the corridor automatically
we've changed the surface style so that
we can see the slope colors to see where
the the steep slopes are we've created
labels to indicate with some text what
those slopes are and then we've also
taken into account the fact that we're
going to need to adjust the building
pads after adjusting the road elevations
so they kind of match the change as well
so with all those things taken into
account and you know we've begun to
address them of course when you do this
exercise on your own try to get it as
close to balance as you can as you can
see it's an iterative process you're
going to drop the road down in certain
areas then you're going to need to drop
the building pads down in the same areas
until you finally get that design as
close to to a balance as you can and the
tool that you use to check that is the
volumes dashboard you can see just how
easy it is to keep track of your volumes
as you work I'm down to 45,000 fill
getting better and better with each
design change that I make so that takes
care of the additional exercise for
chapter 17