Happy Monday, everyone! Over the weekend, I installed a new build of Civil 3D 2009 and for some odd reason decided to actually LOOK at the New Features Workshop. This is where you’ll find almost all of the new features, even the ones that you don’t remember Peter Funk demonstrating in Las Vegas because you were too busy asking your coworker to get you another beer when she went to the bar. Yeah, this is one of those, and it’s one that I’ve been requesting for quite a while. It deals with Surface Volumes and something pretty sweet that you can do with them now.   Intrigued?   Follow the link to find out more.

All this one takes is two screenshots – it’s a very easy one to illustrate. The first one is evident when I run a surface volume analysis between two surfaces – I even highlighted it in the screen grab:

(RJH note – I apologize for the small image – reasons for it are below.  At this point, it’s easier for me to tell you that there are cut and fill factors, as well as adjusted volumes highlighted above.   I’ll try to do better in the future with the images)

Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, you can now enter cut and fill factors for a simple surface volume analysis!  Previously, this could only be accomplished through sections and materials, but sometimes you just want overall numbers without the need for alignments or sections.  

Yet another way that this is implemented is in Volume Surfaces – as you can see in the below image, you can enter the same numbers as you’re creating a Volume Surface:

This is great added functionality to surface volumes – great job, Autodesk!