When designing a pond, naturally one of the most important parts of the design is ensuring that you have enough storage capacity. What if Civil 3D could dynamically track and report your pond’s storage capacity as you made changes to it? What if it automatically subtracted your required freeboard? Check out the video after the jump to see how this can be done.
Great tutorial! I assume this works with Grading in older Civil 3D versions, not just 2010.
Correct Josh, this is not version specific. It should work just fine several releases back. Thanks for pointing that out.
Does the water surface elevation update dynamically if you change the elevation of your feature line?
Yes, David. As long as your surface is set to Rebuild Automatic.
Awesome TIP! Now, if we could only use grading objects and not worry about the drawing becoming incredibly unstable and losing the entire drawing one day when you open the file that would be great.
I will have to bookmark this one for 2015 when grading objects might actually be stable. 😉
I feel your pain Mark. But grading objects and feature lines can provide solutions for you, as long as recognize and accept (sounds like we need a support group)that you have to use them with care and caution. Drawings that have feature lines and grading objects should be squeaky clean and you should make backup copies often. These drawings will bite you every now and then, but if you’re ready, it’s not a big deal. In short, try not to let the instability keep you from reaping the benefits of these features. Maybe in 2015 we’ll have worry-free grading?
Agreed, that is why we like Vault (versioning). I don’t think Featurelines are that bad. They are definitely workable with slight care (in v2009 at leaste) but Grading Objects, I don’t know, I get 4-5 steps into trying to grade a pond with them and I start seeing very unstable activities. So I end up exploding them, which I hate to do, and continue along the way. I can’t wait for the day (version) that I won’t have to explode Grading Objects any longer. The promise of Grading Objects is amazing I just wish they were as stable as Featurelines, which is not wishing for that much, is it? Maybe one day…
Fantastic tip, but as Mark says, dependent on your drawing’s stability. I’m recovering from a Fatal Error as I write this… only the second one today! I wish I could get my hands on 2010; we’re using 2008 here and I get Fatal Errors literally every day. Oh joy.
Stability has definitely improved in 2010 Jakub, but it’s still not perfect. Maybe Mark’s 2015 prediction is more realistic than we think 😐
Quick question: When you lower the water surface to account for the freeboard (-.5 in this example) does the new outline take into consideration the side slopes of the pond? It doesn’t appear to. This may not be a big deal with small freeboard numbers…but it is something that the user should be aware of, no?
When doing this, you only look at the cut number, the part of the pond that is lower than the water surface. Outside the physical edge of the water is all fill so you just ignore that number. Make sense?