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About surface styles - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep Autodesk Certified Professional: Civil 3D for Infrastructure Design

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About surface styles

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- A great way to begin our chapter on surfaces, is to take a look at surface styles. Surface styles are perhaps the most complex type of style in civil 3D. To take a look inside of a surface style, I'll start by clicking a contour in the drawing, and then I'll right click and pick edit surface style. The display tab is a good place to start. Because here you can see all of the different components that you can show for a surface. Now, you typically don't show all of them at once, it's usually a small subset. For example, for this particular style we're displaying the border and the major and minor contours. You can see that all of the other components are turned off. Those components being points, triangles, user contours, the gridded version of the surface, directions, elevations, slopes, slope arrows and watersheds. You can see there are a lot of components that you can potentially display for a surface. And that's why we have all of these tabs here. So let's go through them one by one. First is the information tab. You see this on every style and it contains the name, description and some information about the style. Next we've got the borders tab so for any surface you've got an outer edge plus some surfaces may have holes cut out of them so you have inner edges as well. The border represents those edges. And we can control how elevations are assigned to a border, what types of borders are used, and so on. Contours are of course a very important way to display our surface. And this is a good time to point out that a surface is a single object. And sometimes we will display the contours of the surface, sometimes the TIN lines, sometimes the boundary, sometimes a different combination of those things or other things. But it's important to remember that those aren't separate things. When you're looking at the contours of a surface, you're still looking at that surface, just in a different way. Now one of the most common ways that we display surfaces is using contours because that's a way that a lot of people are familiar with contours being those lines that connect equal elevations along the surface. And as such, we have the ability to control the appearance of those contours and how they behave. So for example, intervals is going to be one area that you often visit when you're setting up a surface style. What is my major and minor interval for my contours. I can also choose how to display contour depressions, or even smooth out my contours. So if there are any sharp bends on my contours I can smooth those out a bit. Next, we've got the grid tab. And typically we show surfaces as a TIN. A triangular a irregular network. So a bunch of triangles stuck together kind of looking like a spiderweb, but we can also display a surface as a grid. A nice even array of squares that form a grid. And if we choose to display our surface in that way, this tab is used to kind of configure how those grids are laid out. Surfaces are typically made of points and we can display those points when we display the surface. It's actually not often done, but if we do that, we do have control over how those points are configured and displayed. And that's what this tab is about. Triangles represent the framework that makes up a surface. In fact, a surface is most often created by taking some point data and connecting lines between those points to form triangles. That's where the term TIN comes from. Triangular irregular network. And when we choose to display those TIN triangles in our surface, this tab controls kind of how they'll behave namely how they'll take on elevation. The default is to use a surface elevation, but we can also flatten them out or even exaggerate them. I will say that this option here, use surface elevation is by far the most common. We can display watersheds on our surfaces. And when we do this tab will help us configure what they look like and how they behave. You can see there are many different types of watersheds and each one can be configured individually as far as its color, and other properties. We can analyze surfaces. In fact, there are four different ways to analyze a surface. Directions, elevations, slopes, and slope arrows. And each one of these sections allows us to control how those analysis are set up and how they're displayed in the drawing. We've already been to the display tab, but let's talk about it a little further. We've seen that we can turn different components on and off using the visible column. We can also control what layer those components are on. Now typically, what a company will do or an organization will assign an object to a layer and then let the layer be responsible for the other graphical properties. You can see here that the color is set to by layer, the line type, line weight and so on. Plot style is set to buy block, but I noticed that plot style is turned off in this drawing. I can tell by the gray appearance of these settings. Now, if we want to override what the layer tells the object to do, we certainly can. So for example, right now my major contours are on a layer called C-TOPO major, which is a light gray color. But if I wanted them to look blue, I could certainly go in here and override that and pick blue. But again, typically that's not how it's done. Typically, a layer is assigned and then we let AutoCAD take over from there and use that layers properties to define the appearance of that object. And then finally we've got the summary tab, which is kind of everything all in one place. So there you have it. That's a look inside the powerful and complex surface style.

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