Under Pipes>Create Network from Objects you can choose to have Civil 3D use the vertex elevations of your feature line or 3d polyline. Unfortunately, this uses the elevations for the resulting pipe centerline instead of the inverts. Mark came up with an idea to help with this problem…
Click more to find out how…
Go into Partbuilder and make yourself a very very small diameter pipe. Ideally, it would be zero diameter.
Pipes>Create Network from Objects
Choose your feature line
Make sure “Use Vertex Elevations” is checked and your Zero diameter pipe is chosen
(Note that sometimes zero diameter pipes come in looking chubby and weird, that’s ok as long as their properties list as zero diameter, this works)
Change your pipe from zero diameter to your desired diameter and make sure “Hold Invert at Resize” is selected.
And there you go…
Well, this looks like a great idea, good lateral thinking. However, I’ve been trying to make it work and I’ve been getting consistent fatal errors as soon as I create the zero (.003m actually) diameter pipe. Any hints?
Thanks,
Trevor
Well, I feel stupid. We’re using feature lines: lift the entire line by half the pipe inner diameter and use the actual pipe size when creating the network. Don’t even half to worry about a zero diameter pipe then.
Unfortunately, Civil 3D only allows one feature line to be converted at a time when using the “Convert from object” method and each feature line creates a new network, which is no good for doing a “Crossing pipes” network as I was trying to do.
At least this post got the creative juices flowing. Thanks!
Trevor