Producing a Topographical Survey that Showing different Gradients/Slopes

[Anonymous]

Hello All,
I am new to Civil3D And I am using it for one purpose,
Im working at producing planning drawings for solar farms, and the client has asked to me produce topographical surveys highlighting where the gradient or the slope is greater than 15 degrees

Is there someway i can use Civil 3d to do this?

Ideally im looking at producing a 3D Model which has shaded areas for the areas which are above 15 degrees
And Hopefully another shaded for areas between 15 and 10 degrees, 10 and 5 and 5 and 0

The topographical surveys i am downloading at the moment are from a site called promap and are DSM Type?
Thanks for reading this message and please excuse my ignorance on the Subject

[Hidden_Brain]

STEP 1: start new drawing with a out of the box NCS template

STEP 2: create your surface (or import into this drawing)

STEP 3: surface properties>analysis tab > run a slope analysis for desired intervals, set colors as necessary.

STEP 4: assign SLOPE BANDING style to your surface to see the slope colors

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the Reply, I have created the surface from a 3D Polyline Survey,
(although it did come up with many error messages during creation)
I have completed the slope analysis and it has filled all the slopes as one colour, 
How do i go about applying the "Slope Banding" 
Thanks again for your help

[Anonymous]

This is the Error Messages i am getting when trying to make a surface

[Hidden_Brain]

Right click on the surface, go to properties, then assign a slopes style to the surface. If you started with a NCS template, I think there is a surface style called slope banding 2D. Assign this style to your surface.

As for the errors, you have lines crossing that you are using to create your surface. You can either zoom to and resolve them, or set "allow crossing  breaklines" under your surface properties definition tab.

[neilyj666]

I think I'd look at all these crossing breakline errors to see why they are occuring (typically 3D poly lines crossing each other with no common point at the intersection). The elevation different may be very small ( several mm in metric) or larger (10's or 100's of mm) but either way the integrity of you surface will be questionable.

Depending on the end use (planning drawing and slope analysis in this case) the surface integrity may not be an issue but it may become an issue further down the line 

[Anonymous]

The lines are not crossing in anyway as far as i can tell, 
Still coming up with these Errors, The Topo Survey i am working on is a DSM RADAR Contour drawing as Attached,
Also whenever is run the Analysis my computer seems to be Crashing, Im running 
A Quad Core 3Ghz Processer with 4 Gig of Ram
Internal Graphics card with 1632mb of memory
(I Gather this may not be Enough)

Thanks for all your help, 
3rd Day in the Job and the Boss is shouting at me to get this done lol

[Hidden_Brain]

i do not have access to Civil 3D at the moment, so I hope someone else can take a look at your file and help you out! if its crashing while running the slope analysis, you may want to limit your analysis only to the area of concern. to do that, add a surface outer border (non-destructive) and then re-run the slope analysis on the smaller surface.

[AllenJessup]

If the breaklines look OK try editing the command settings to allow crossing breaklines.

The crashing:

"A Quad Core 3Ghz Processor with 4 Gig of Ram Internal Graphics card with 1632mb of memory (I Gather this may not be Enough)"

You gather correctly! Processor is good (it's the speed that counts) but RAM is way low and you need at least a mid-range graphics card with a Gig or 2 on it. 8 GB of system RAM is minimal, 12 GB or better is more like it.

[AllenJessup]

Looks like I was wrong about the end points. At least Help says they don't count. Or maybe that the setting doesn't help those cases.

From Help-

"This setting does not apply to breakline intersections that occur at the endpoints of breaklines"

[neilyj666]

Nothing wrong with this??

The crossing lines appear to be associated with the clipping boundary as the vertices do not tie up with the contour line ends

[neilyj666]

Also ensure you are using an appropriate style (this is from the UKIE template)

[Anonymous]

So if i just ignore the clipping boundary from my surface contour selection i shouldnt get the errors cropping up?

That Jpeg is exacly what i need, Just wish i had the machine capable of doing this
Once i have these gradients shown as different colour will it be possible to put a transparency to the colours to show Contour lines/Aerial photograph of the site beneath??

[neilyj666]

Yes that should remove the errors - you machine should just about be able to produce whats required (but maybe slowly).

If you are using 2013 then you can't make the surface transparent but you can select it and Send to Back and choose pastel colours for the slope analysis

If using 2011 or 2012 you can make the surface transparent

[AllenJessup · Accepted solution]

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@neilyj666 wrote:

If you are using 2013 then you can't make the surface transparent but you can select it and Send to Back and choose pastel colours for the slope analysis

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I suppose that in 2013 you could revert to the old trick of choosing colors that are set to plot at 10-50% shading. That way what is underneath will show through. Takes some experimenting to get it to look good on your plotter.

[Anonymous]

Seems a bit odd that 2013 has regressed in terms of transparancy and Also the option to export from Google Earth has disappeared so im reading?
Do you think its feasible to carry out slope anaylsis on the data google earth kicks out if i can find myself a copy of Civil3D 2012?
Thus saving money on purchasing topographical surveys for a large number of sites
Or is the data from google earth a bit too vague?
Thanks for your help again, Been a Life Saver

[neilyj666]

Yes that'll work too - I tend to use the Plot to PDF.pc3 file which gives less than perfect results when using transparency/screening

[neilyj666]

Yes they broke transparency for 2013 and still not fixed it - here's hoping for 2014...!!!!

I would use Google Earth for anything but the most basic purposes - where in the world are you??

[Anonymous]

Uk, Working on sites in wales mostly

[neilyj666]

Solar developments.....in Wales.....!?!?!?!?(land of my birth)

In that case you don't necessarily need to buy anything http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/land-form-panorama/index.html has contours/DTM for free - not the best but probably ok for your requirements. I use this data for initial wind farm development work before either buying a DTM or undertaking topo surveys