Feature Lines and Sites

[seanbuccs]

Hello somebody please help me.

I am new to civil 3d. I am building a site down the side of a mountain which consists of 4 tiers/ pads with different levels. Each of the 4 pads has its own feature line. To prevent any confusion or attractions of the feature lines to each other i have moved them to a site that i created called temp site locations.

What is the best way and location to do each of these gradings and how do i tie them all back on to the same drawing ????????????

. I assume (maybe wrongly) to do each seperatly and copy back into the the real drawing.

Do i need to create a new site for each pad

if i do my grading in the temperary site when i bring them back to the real site will the interact with the other feature lines.

Looking forward to your replies

Sean

[BrianHailey]

"Sites" in Civil 3D are probably one of the most confusing things around. When you think of a site, you probably think, "The location of my project". This is so far from what a site actually is. A site is a topology. I wrote up an explanation of what a "Site" is on my blog. You can read about it HERE.

In short, just create a seperate site for each piece of grading and then create a surface for each one (personally, I would do them each in a different drawing). Once you have surfaces done, create another surface and paste all the individual surfaces into that one surface and you're done.

[Sinc]

The whole key is that "Sites" are kind of a logical grouping.  C3D entities that are on the same "Site" will interact with each other.  Sometimes these interactions are good, and are what you want.  Other times, they are bad, and you definitely don't want those things on the same "Site".

One example of interactions are Feature Lines...  Feature Lines that cross each other will adopt the same elevation at those crossing points, if they are on the same Site, introducing a non-editable PI into one of the Feature Lines.  Another example is Parcels with Alignments...  Stick the Alignment on the same Site as the Parcels, and you will get "autogenerated" Parcels, based on the Alignment.  There are other ways various C3D entities interact, when they are on the same Site.

The key is to make sure you place elements on different Sites, if you don't want them to interact.

And yes, the term "Site" is confusing...  I've been trying to think of a better term for this, but haven't yet come up with something I really like.