From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D: Site Design

What is site design? - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D: Site Design

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What is site design?

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- [Instructor] Before we dig into designing sites with Civil 3D, let's take a moment and talk about site design itself. Site design is for things like parking lots, ponds, athletic fields, transit stations and things like that. It is not a long and linear form of design like we see here with this corridor. As far as the software is concerned and as far as just the design approach is concerned, there is a big difference between how we look at corridor design versus site design. One of the biggest differences is corridor design is generally very uniform, meaning that we can automate a lot of the process and we can define it with a set series of steps that we can use over and over again with each road design. Site design is completely the opposite. Every site design is different. There's no way to define a set of steps that you can complete for every site design that's going to work for you. Every site has a different shape, different topography, different constraints. So, as I said, it's impossible to capture what you do with site design in a series of steps or in a work flow process. Because of that, I think it's probably the most difficult type of design to teach and to learn because you can't just nail it down into a step-by-step process. But there are techniques that you can learn and use them as puzzle pieces to fit together to get from bare ground to a finished design. Now, site design involves the primary elements of grading and storm design, but can also involve utility design, minor road design and many other things. Now, what I mean when I say grading design is the shaping of the ground You can see this gray surface here that represents the new way that we want the ground to be shaped to accommodate the parking lot and the pond. The storm design has to do with collecting rainfall and conveying it to a safe location and often treating it with some sort of pond or storage channel or something to slow down the flow of water, because typically when we take a forest or a field, something that's very pervious, that soaks up water very well and we replace that with pavement, we increase the amount and the rate of run off very dramatically and we have to mitigate that. So, we often put things in place like this pond. In this course, we're going to focus on the grading and drainage design aspects of site design. So, not so much on any road design or utilities or things like that. We're going to look at the shaping of the ground and we're going to look at designing this conveyance system and the pond. So, hopefully that gives you a little bit of background and insight into site design to prepare you for the upcoming videos.

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