Back to Basics Pt. 1: Roadway Design in Civil 3D - ArcGIS Connector & Surface Creation

This video series will focus on workflows and best practices for creating a roadway project. We will begin by demonstrating the ArcGIS connector by gathering existing data for a project. We will also create surfaces from different data sources. - Author Name: Ben Wardell - Follow us on Twitter: @AutodeskCivil3D - | @InfraWorks - - Follow us on Facebook: @AutodeskInfraworks - | @Autodeskcivil3d - - Subscribe to the Blog to stay up to date: - Subscribe: Details: GIS data is generally available from owners or public agencies and we can create an ArcGIS map that will link directly to the County’s live database. In this case we will connect to Douglas County. Once we have added the layers we want we can view the map under the “MyGroups” tab. This connection between ESRI and Autodesk gives users an expanded library of data that can be sorted, classified, and imported to their project files. In Civil 3D we begin by defining the project coordinate system. The project we are showing here in Colorado State Plane – Central zone in US ft in the United States. Once the coordinate system is set, we can save the file to our project folder on BIM 360 Design. Now we can add the layers and elements to our drawing from ArcGIS. Under the insert tab, we can select the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS. This will take us to the ArcGIS view space where we can identify our project area. We have a few option to select our area, but for now we will draw a rectangle around our area of interest. Under the Public tab we can search for any data available to us in our area of interest. Here we can view the roadway centerlines near our project, as well as several other data maps that are available. We can refine our search for more detailed items. In this case we can search for Traffic data and view the layers associated with that map. When we select My Groups, we can view the items that we created previously. When we choose the Douglas County map we can see several layers of information that we can import. For now we will just choose the roadway centerlines and simply select Add to my design project and these lines will be imported into the drawing. Once that loads, we can view the linework. These were brought in as alignments and we can see the geometry in the tool prospector. We could have brought them in as features lines as well, we just need to specify that in ArcGIS before we add them. There are a number of items we can add to our drawing. We have access to contour data, flood maps, airport clearance maps, rivers, trails and variety of existing features. We want to include the data that may impact our design and provide as much detail as possible about the existing conditions. Some of those items will be the 100 year flood plain shown here, as well as the existing parcel map and property or Right of Way data. All of this data will be vital to include in our base mapping for the project. In the next part of the workflow we will create a surface from contour data that we downloaded from the county. We will set up a new drawing in the same way where we identify the coordinate system and save it our project folder on BIM 360. These contours were imported with the Map import feature and we used the data in the downloaded files to add the elevation to the contours. Checking here we see the lines do have the correct elevation information. With the linework set at the correct elevations, we will create a new surface and we will call this EG for existing ground. Under the definitions option, we can right click to add contours to our surface. We have a number of options to control the surface creation and we can describe the items we are importing. For this surface I want to include all the lines we from the contour map. Once the surface processes, we can view the contour data and compare to the map lines. We can do this by selecting the surface properties of our surface and changing the contour display interval. We will actually turn off the imported contour lines. Once the surface has been inspected we can now make it available to other users by creating a data short cut. The data short cut folder has been set to reside on BIM 360. So we simply select the surface and we can see that is it is now available to use in this project.