Creating a surface from existing points

[Anonymous]

Hello there,

I am new to Civil 3D and I am having some trouble creating a TIN from a point layer in Civil 3D 2011. Would the best course of action be to extract the points from the drawing and creating a surface from there, or is there a way to create the TIN around the existing points in Model space?

Thanks! Looking forward to joining the community here. I'm much better versed in AutoCAD, but excited about furthering my understanding with Civil3D.

[Jeff_M]

All points belong to a Point Group, conveniently called _AllPoints. You can create more groups, if desired, that contain only certain points. Add the PointGoup(s) you want to use to the surface definition:

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[troma]

1. Create a TIN surface.  There is at this point nothing in the drawing, no data in the surface.  It is just an empty name.

2. Put data in the surface.

I'm not sure what you mean by a point layer.  Do you have acad points or C3D cogo points?  Either way you can build a surface from them in your drawing.

[sboon]

First - welcome to the board.

You say that you have points in a drawing.  Are they Civil3d point objects, blocks from another piece of software, or simple ACad points?  Jeff's post describes what to do with Civil3d points.  The process is similar for the others, but you would probably use the Definition from Drawing Objects option.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all of the welcome and the replies. They are Autcad3D points. I was able to add them to the point groups within surface definitions. I'm not seeing the surface yet though. Whenever I created a surface from a PNEZ point file the suface was visible right away, not sure what step I've missed.

Thank you.

[AllenJessup]

You may have your Surface Style set to No display or Border Only. Right click on the Surface on the Prospector tab and select Surface Properties. Select a style that shows contours or what ever you want to see.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response,

It looks like I can only choose "standard" style. Is there a way to add contours, or TIN etc?

[sboon · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you have started work from a source drawing that was not created in Civil3d.  This file will not have any of the Civil3d styles and settings that you need to work successfully.  At this point your best option is probably to abandon what you've done, and close the file without saving. 

Start a new drawing from a Civil3d template, either Imperial or Metric then insert your source file as a block and explode it.  This process will allow you to start working in a drawing that has what you will need.

[AllenJessup · Accepted solution]

OK. From your response I take it you didn't use a Template to create the drawing. You should always use a template. Eventually you'll set up your own with all your customized styles in it.

For now. I'd suggest starting a new drawing from one of the stock DWT (Drawing Template).  These are a few of the stock ones:

The usual path is something like this: "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Autodesk\C3D 2012\enu\Template\_AutoCAD Civil 3D (Metric) NCS.dwt"

Then insert the drawing you've been working in. This should give you access to the stock styles.

[Jeff_M]

In addition to Steve's sound advice, you may want to take some time and go through the C3D tutorials. It will likely save you a lot of time and frustration over the next several months.