How to turn benching lines into surface

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

What's the best way to turn the attached lines into a surface that reflects the benching geometry.

• Use is for a volume calc (between this and another surface).
• When I create TIN surface it's not representative of the original model.

Thank you for the help,

Jack

[ChrisRS]

What are we looking at? Are these lines, or 3d poly lines or feature lines?

If you are looking for excavation volume you need existing and finish grade surfaces.

Attaching the drawing would help.

[Anonymous]

Yes I do have a finished surface an am aiming to use this as the base surface.

Hence, trying to get an accurate representation of the lines as surfaces.

I've attached the file here for reference.

Cheers

[ChicagoLooper]

Create a new surface and name it TRENCH. For the Trench surface definition=>Breaklines=>Add=>select all trench line work.

Then VOLUMESDASHBOARD=>Create new volume surface icon. Base=Trench surface. Comparison surface=EG.

[Anonymous]

Hey Chicagolooper,

I seem to get the same result (see attached). Is there a way to make the approximation of the surface more accurate (ie take more points between the lines or something?)

Cheers,

J

[ChicagoLooper]

You'll have to 'add' more data, such as, but not limited to, additional points or additional lines. What areas or specific parts are not satisfactory to the proposed bench?

You could add more breaklines, one-by-one, until you achieve the bench you want. Then edit the surface components, e.g. edit lines, edit triangles, edit points, edit elevations, etc.... Think sculpture, but instead of using hammer and chisel, you're using breaklines and mouse. 

[ChrisRS · Accepted solution]

Civil 3D surfaces do not support vertical faces.

The steps in stripes.dwg were vertical. I offset the bottom of each vertical face 0.01 toward the center of the trench so there was no vertical face or overhang. I saved the drawing as stripes offset.dwg.

I suspect that stripes and stripes offset are corrupt. Selection all ([CTRL] [A]) shows 389 lines, 2 Xrefs 10 3D polylines and 1 polyline. A window selection shows only 132 lines. 

I selected 1 lines, [Right click] ...  Select Similar and Wblock the lines to stripes offset wblock.dwg.

Working with this clean drawing I selected all 132 lines and created feature lines on Site FG. There was a warning and only 131 feature lines were created. (I have no idea what the phantom parcel is.)

I selected all of the feature lines and added as breaklines to surface FG. I ignored the minor error at each end.

I temporarily turned off the display of triangles for FG. Then added lines across the top of the trench, shown in red. 

 I converted these lines to feature lines on Site EG. and added the resulting feature lines to a new Surface EG.

Compute the volume by creating a TIN Volume Surface based on FG and EG. 

Drawings are attached (2020).

Good Luck.

[Anonymous]

Thank a lot this was very helpful 🙂