From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

What are Civil 3D sites and parcels? - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Civil 3D 2020 Essential Training

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What are Civil 3D sites and parcels?

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- [Host] As we begin to work with Parcels in Autodesk Civil 3D, it's good to just pause and get a better grasp of really what we're talking about in the software when we refer to parcels. Parcels are really another way to describe a property or a spacial area that's defined by boundary edges. There in lays the challenge. The parcel as we see in this drawing is the empty space. It's open. In this case we really have two parcels. The parcel is not the segments and that sometimes is confusing as well. We get into it. We say okay select the property and we want to grab the boundary that defines the parcel or property. The life and how the world is divided property wise. The Earth is split into all these different parcels and each parcel segment, the boundary is shared between multiple parcels. So this boundary is shared between this parcel and this parcel and of course every other boundary edge is shared with another property or parcel. So it's not really the segments that make up the parcel. The segment simply create an enclosed space and the enclosed space is the parcel. It's rare to even visually show a parcel object unless we set up in the style to hatch or something similar. So now that we have a better grasp of how Civil 3D works or thinks about a parcel, we also have to see what it uses to create a parcel. In creating a parcel in Civil 3D the software creates the parcels. We feed it the segments that define an enclosed space. And so if we back up there's actually an AutoCAD command we're used to using, that needs an enclosed space to work, and that's a boundary hatch. We can select an enclosed space or we can pick an internal point and it will find an enclosed space. Civil 3D will automatically find an enclosed space of objects that are within the same site. Now a lot of times we think of a site we think of a project but again we have to understand Civil 3D terminology. A site is a container. It is a Civil 3D object that is a container of objects that you want to interact with one another. If they interact and Civil 3D finds an enclosed space it automatically creates a parcel. And so we see in Prospector here under Sites, there's already a site or container called Property. It would show all the parcels listed under here. We feed the container or site a parcel segments or alignments or other objects that are horizontal in nature. When they are in the same site and an enclosed area is found Civil 3D creates the parcel for you. We don't create parcels. We feed the software segments. If we don't want a parcel to be created, we either don't store the object in a site or container or we create multiple containers or sites for the same project. You can have as many sites as you need. Now we have a better grasp of how this works. It really defines how we create parcels. As you see here we have an outer boundary and then we start subdividing. We do not create an enclosed poly line for each parcel. One of the reasons is again this is a shared segment however it actually has two lines crossing there. We feed both segments that share the same X Y and Z to the container in Civil 3D. It's really struggling here. It will work. It will figure it out but its trying to create another parcel in that empty enclosed space. So good practice. We're going to think in real world terms. We're going to take our property or parcel and begin subdividing it with the shared segments. Our first we have creating parcels is using existing objects and feeding those existing objects into a site as a parcel segment. Let's see how we do that.

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