From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

Understand surfaces - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 Essential Training

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Understand surfaces

- [Instructor] Surfaces are one of the most important objects you'll work with in Civil 3D. Let's get to know surfaces a bit before we move on to the rest of the videos in this chapter. Most civil engineering projects involve the modification of the topography. For example, in this project, we're going to be creating some roads for our subdivision and to do that, we'll actually need to change the shape of the ground so that we can more easily drive a car down along those roads. Now, in order to figure out how to modify the topography, we need to know the shape of it before we even get started. And the way that Civil 3D handles that definition of the existing ground surface is using something called a TIN model. TIN stands for triangular irregular network. You can see it represented here in the lower right view port. It kind of looks like a spider web made up of triangles. What's actually going on here is that Civil 3D has connected points that are close together using 3D lines. And then we can take that output and make it a little more accurate using a number of methods to manipulate the surface. You'll learn about some of those in some upcoming videos. Surfaces are most often viewed as contours, the way you see them in the left view port. But they can be viewed in many, many other ways. Surfaces are used for calculating volumes, cutting profiles and sections, performing hydrology calculations, and many other important functions. For that reason, this is one of the most important chapters you'll study in this course, so pay extra close attention. Okay, now that we know a little bit about surfaces, let's create one in the next video.

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