Create parcels from objects - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

- [Voiceover] Now that you know a bit about parcels, it's time to begin creating them. A good place to start is to create parcels using objects that you've already drawn. Let's see how it works. Before we get into it, let's describe our project and what we're going to be doing over the series of videos that you're about to complete. As I zoom in, you'll see that we have an existing road running north to south, and our development comes off of that road, and here we see kind of a main new road that starts at the south end and wraps around to the north. Now, if you've completed the Basic Road Design with Civil 3D course, you're quite familiar with that road because in that course we design that road. If we zoom in a little closer, we see a little site area here. This is actually a clubhouse, slash residential office, real estate office that is part of our development. We also see some existing property, some existing structures here over to the right, and you can see some line work representing that area being carved out, so this is not part of our development. This is actually part of existing property owners that are adjacent to our development, and then as we zoom in a bit closer, we see a series of kind of purplish red lines that represent our new property line. So, over here to the left, or to the west, we see a blue overall boundary. So, this is the overall boundary of our entire project, blue on the west, and then a little bit of blue on the east. So, our development takes place in between the two blue polylines, and then to the right-of-way of the existing road shown here in yellow, and then as I began to describe, the reddish purple, or reddish pink lines represent new property lines within that, and it's kind of a framework built out by proposed right-of-ways for the roads and some offsets representing the backs of lot lines. So, this is a typical place you would start in a residential layout is, you know, you would layout the road center lines and start offsetting. We are saying in this development we want our lots to be about 150 feet deep, so, and the right-of-ways to be about 50 feet in width, so from a road center line you would offset either side 25 feet, establish the right-of-way, offset another 150 feet to establish the back of the lot, and then maybe another 150 feet to start the next series of right-of-way center line right-of-way, and I can tell you from my experience, I went through several iterations 'till I got a configuration that fit as well as I could make it. Usually you're dealing with very irregular shapes with the property, and it takes some time. It takes some time to get a layout that you're pleased with, all the while doing it with just basic AutoCAD commands. So, all of the line work that you see here, with the exception of the road alignment in this case, was done using basic AutoCAD commands, like Offset Trim, Extend, Fill it, you know, drawing lines, arcs and circles, and you know, we're not gonna cover all of that, or any of that, in this course, because this is a Civil 3D course. If you're curious, or you wanna learn about how to make constructions like you see here, you definitely wanna check out an AutoCAD course to get those skills in place. Now, what we're interested in doing in this video is we wanna start creating some parcels, because right now all we have are polylines. There's a polyline here, polyline here, and these reddish purple, or reddish pink lines are also polylines. Now, I did take some care to make sure that everything's pretty well cleaned up and all joined together, so you'll notice, like if I click this area, it highlights a very big, long polyline that encompasses a lot of different cul-de-sac outlines and things like that. So, I took the time to join that all together to make sure my geometry was very accurate and that it wasn't sloppy and I didn't have, you know, lines extending out of our other lines and things like that. This is nice, clean geometry that I have to work with. So, what we wanna look at in this video is how to take some of the geometry and start carving this property up into smaller and smaller pieces, but before we start carving anything, we have to create something to carve from. So, from the Home ribbon tab, on the Parcel menu, I'm going to go to Create Parcel from Objects. I'll launch the tool, and just to start simple, I'm going to choose the right-of-way of the existing road, the west right-of-way, and then this outer property line, which is all one polyline. Now, here's the magic of parcels in Civil 3D, when I press Enter, it's going to ask me to answer some questions. What style do I want, and what area label style do I want? I can even add bearing and distance labels, which I'm not ready for at this point, but I'm gonna use this parcel style called Property, and I'm going to use an area label style called Boundary Name. I'll click okay. Notice that I have Erase Existing Entities checked, so anything that I've selected is going to be removed and replaced with parcel objects. I click OK, and we'll notice that a label pops up, and this is a clear indicator that Civil 3D has created a parcel. If I zoom in a little more closely, we see that this is Property One, and if I zoom out a bit and click that label, you'll see that parcel outline, so you can see the dash lines here. If I follow them around, it also is hugging the western edge of the road and then wrapping back around again. Now, I want to actually carve this part out, as well, so I'm just going to repeat the command, Create Parcel from Objects. I'll select the inner blue polyline this time, and the same choices are stored from the last command, so I can just click OK. Now, I've got two parcels, one representing the area that I'm developing, or subdividing, and then another representing this existing property. Now, this is probably subdivided into individual lots, as well, but I'm not worried about it. I just wanna separate it out from the part that I'm developing. So, now I've got one big parcel, one big lot that I can start to carve up into smaller pieces. So, continuing with the use of this Create Parcel from Objects command, I'm just going to repeat it again, and this time I'll choose the pink geometry, representing the different property lines, or the framework of property lines that I'm establishing. So, again, we're looking at the rights-of-way, the back lot lines, some other lines that kinda break things up, like we're separating out this clubhouse area, creating a divider between this part of the subdivision and this part. Pretty basic stuff, but when I press Enter, and this time I'm gonna choose slightly different styles. I'm gonna use a style called Single Family, and then for the area label style, I'm gonna use one called Parcel Name. Click OK, and now we've got even more parcels. So, as I click the parcel names, we can see them start to get carved up into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually, we're gonna carve all this up into, primarily, single-family lots. But, there you can see how easy it is to go from entities in your drawing, lines, arc, circles, polylines, to parcel objects. So, there you have it. All you have to do is tell Civil 3D which geometry in your drawing is supposed to be parcel objects, and Civil 3D takes care of the rest. As far as creating the overall parcels, applying styles, and even adding labels.