From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D: Designing Gravity Pipe Systems

Creating pipe rules - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D: Designing Gravity Pipe Systems

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Creating pipe rules

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- Wouldn't it be great if Civil 3D checked your design as you went, to make sure that you're meeting key design requirements? Well, it does. Let's see how design rules make that possible. What I'm going to do here is go to the Settings tab of the TOOLSPACE, and if I scroll down to the section under Pipe, you'll see this, node of the tree called Pipe Rule Set. I'll expand that out and you can see that there are two here already, Basic and Standard. I'd like to create a new one, so I'll right-click Pipe Rule Set and pick new. And I'll click on the Information tab and I'm going to call this Residential Storm. Next, I'll go to the Rules tab and actually start setting up the rules that I want to include. So, I'll simply click Add Rule, and if you look at the Category and Rule name, we've got Storm Sewer as our only category, and the Rule name, Cover and Slope, Cover Only, Length Check, Pipe to Pipe Match, or Site Pipe End Location. I'm interested in doing a Cover and Slope rule, so I want Civil 3D to watch my pipes, to make sure that they meet certain minimum and maximum Cover and Slope requirements, and you can see the values below. Now these are actually default values. In the next step, I'm going to supply the values that I actually wanted it to use. So I click OK, and that adds the Cover and Slope rule to my Rule Set. And I can add multiple rules, by the way, if I want to. I'll expand that out, and this is how I get to the actual values. So, for my design, a Maximum Cover of 10 feet is good, I'd like my Maximum Slope to be 10%, my Minimum Cover to be 2.5, but we're going to allow it to be three for right now. And my Minimum Slope, I want to ultimately be .5%, but for now we'll let it be 1%. So right now it's a little more strict, it's requiring a higher amount of cover than I'm typically used to, and a steeper Minimum Slope than than I'm typically used to, but for now we'll go with it. I'll click OK, and I've created my new Residential Storm Rule Set. And notice that there are also Rule Sets for structures. We're not going to create or edit one of those, but it's basically the same idea. I've got the Information tab which contains the name and description, and then I simply add some rules here. You can see a Pipe Drop Across Structure, it's requiring a .1 foot or a tenth of a foot drop from one pipe to the next, and I can also check to make sure that certain pipe diameter sizes are not exceeded. And there are other rules I can add as well. So Structure Rules work basically the same as Pipe Rules, it's just a matter of adding the rules that you want to apply and then choosing the right values for minimums, maximums, and so on.

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