From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

Combine surfaces - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

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Combine surfaces

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- When grading a project, you usually don't design the whole project at once. Instead, you do it in smaller parts. At some point you'll need to combine those parts into one overall surface. That's what we're going to talk about in this video. As we look at this drawing, you'll notice that we've got the grading all completed, all of the lot grading is completed, you'll notice an interior pond here, there's even a little area here that's been graded along the daylight line between lot 73 and 76. Currently, these are all different surfaces, there are five or six different surfaces in this drawing. In fact, if we go to prospector and expand surfaces, we'll see them all here. Now as I said in the opening, there comes a time when you want to put this all together as one final FG or finished ground surface. So let's do that. I'll start by right clicking surfaces and then picking create surface. I'll call this FG final and for the style, I'm going to choose a design contour style contours one foot and five foot design. Now currently, all the other surfaces in the drawing have been set to a no display style. So even though we don't see any contours, those surfaces are here. Next I'll go to the FG final surface over here in prospector. I'll expand it out, then expand definition. And I want to look for this edits node. I'll right click edits and pick paste surface. So what we're doing is we're starting with an empty surface and pasting other surfaces into it to build it out. The first surface we're going to paste in is lots exterior. So let's pick that and click OK. And you'll see right away in the drawing that we get contours for these exterior lots. If we look in the interior, we just see some haphazard contours, kind of stretching across the interior of our project. So let's do the next surface. This time to get started, I'll click one of the contours of the surface in the drawing. And I'll go up here to edit surface on the ribbon and click paste surface. Another way to launch the paste surface command. This time I'm going to pick road FG. This is the surface that was defined from our corridor. I'll click OK. Now let's zoom in and check out what has happened. Here you can see the very well defined contours along the surface. And because of the boundary that's applied on the corridor surface, we see that all those interior contours have been cleared out. Let's do another one. Notice the surface is still selected. So I'll just go up here to edit surface and then paste surface. And this time I'll pick pond and as we would expect the pond contours now, enter into the picture. The next one we'll do is lots interior. Now watch what happens to the pond contours. You can see them here and up here on the right. They disappear and they're overwritten by some haphazard contours that are obviously not valid grading. So what happened? Well, the way the pasting surfaces works is the last surface in wins. So because we pasted in the pond surface, and then after that, pasted in the interior lot surface, interior lots has overwritten the pond surface, there's an easy solution to that. Our surface is still selected, I'm going to come up here and pick surface properties. And then I want to go to the definition tab, and you'll see this order of operations down here. All I need to do is put in the pond surface after the lots interior surface and that will fix the issue. So I can either pick the pond surface and bump it down, or pick this one and bump it up. With the end result that I want is for the pond to come in after the lots interior surface so that it's data overwrites lots interior. Let's click OK. Click rebuild. And you can see we get the result that we want. We've got one last little surface to drop in. And that's this area right here. So one more time, I'll click edit surface and then paste surface. And this time we'll pick lot daylight. So now the entire project is being represented by one surface, and one set of contours. So that's how you combine surfaces in Civil 3D. In the next video, you'll learn how to analyze a surface.

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