Civil3D Pipe Bury Depth Rules

[Anonymous]

I am currently working on a water line on a site that has some pretty steep slopes. Does anyone know how to properly use the Pipe Rules? I have one currently set up to a 6' pipe cover, but it doesn't seem to work 100%. Any thoughts? Also, at points where drastic elevation changes occur, does Civil3D have the ability to automatically insert structures to maintain a set bury depth?

[BrianHailey]

It sounds like you are using pipe networks and not pressure networks, please correct me if I'm wrong.

When laying out pipes in a pipe network, Civil 3D does the best it can to maintain the rules but it isn't always able to. After your pipes are laid out, you can reapply the rules and this might get you close. I always like to tell people to not confuse rules with design. The rules aren't there to do your design for you, just to give you a starting point and to let you know if your design violates the rules.

As to automatically adding additional structures in terrain that varies a lot, pipe networks won't do that. You'll have to manually add the structures.

If you are using pressure networks, you can set your pipe(s) to follow the surface and it will break your pipe up according to the set cut length and it will follow the surface at a specific cover.

[kcobabe]

As stated before, we would need to know exactly what system you are using.

Pressure networks have the exact tool you are looking for.  You can have the line follow the ground and it will defelect and place bends dependent on what is needed to follow the ground.

If you are using the gravity system, it's a little more difficult, but not to difficult.  The main thing is you have to go back in after and clean it up a bit if the deflection angle or a bend would not be logically allowable.  Basically you just create a feature line that follows the ground, then create a system by an object.  If it's a small system I would just go in there and do it manually.  Pretty easy to do using the Vport command and the Null object.  Just make sure you have a style that will create a non plotable entity.  If you don't finding all those little suckers could be tricky.