Cut & Fill Volume Check

[nostupidquestions]

Is there any way to check cut & fill volumes? I've got 2 surfaces, existing and proposed, and I've used the Volumes Dashboard to get my cut & fill volumes. Is there a way to check that number to make sure it's accurate? Back in the Land Desktop days there were 3 ways to check volumes and I always did that just to make sure I wasn't way off.

[Joe-Bouza]

What did we do in LDT? I forget.

IMHO, you best check is to examine you FG Triangles, for errant that span large areas.

look a the front view for any crazy spikes both EG and FG

Does a order of magnitude check make sense? purely engineering judgment area/ depth quick calc

You can run an alignment a sample lines but I think that may frustrate with varied results. If used the spacing will have a huge effect on the answer

[nostupidquestions]

The surfaces look fine. I cut a profile through the site and it looks fine. I've been trying to figure out how to get volumes from cross sections but it seems like it involves materials and lists and such. Seems more complicated than it ought to be.

I think the old LDD used points, grids or average end area. The number could still be wrong but if all 3 were close to the same at least I could show that. With the Volume Dashboard it's just a number that I can't check. Time to break out the planimeter I guess.

[BrianHailey · Accepted solution]

In LDT the three methods where (if I remember correctly), TIN, Grid, and Section. Tin is by far the most accurate (assuming the models are accurate - GIGO). Grid was there as an option so you didn't have to spend hours calculating your volumes on that new 386 with 64 MB of RAM you just got. Sections were a way to duplicate the way we used to calculate volumes back when we were hand drafting. You can still do all three. When creating a volume surface in Civil 3D, you can choose either a "TIN volume surface" or a "Grid volume surface".

As for the section method, it's a bit more complicated but you can still do it. Create an alignment that spans both surfaces, create sample lines that sample both surfaces, and then use the "Compute Materials" command.

The Grid and Section options will give you an approximate volume of your surfaces and the TIN option will give you the mathematical exact volume between the two surfaces. If it gives you bad volumes, then you have bad surfaces somewhere.

[neilyj666]

REPORTSURFACEVOLUMES if I recall correctly - I've added to my ribbon so not sure of the command

[nostupidquestions]

I ended up creating cross sections every foot and getting a volume that way. It comes out pretty close to the Volume Dashboard. The boss was having a cow about the amount of fill needed to fill in a site and I wanted to be able to show him some numbers that I could back up. Thanks for the help.