Autodesk AUTOCAD PLANT 3D 2011 - SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS, Tutorials Manual

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Surfaces Tutorials
These tutorials will get you started working with land surfaces. A surface is a central object
for AutoCAD Civil 3D, and can be referenced by alignments, parcels, and other objects
throughout the design process.
NOTE All drawings used in these tutorials are available in the
tutorial drawings folder (page
819)
. If you want to save your work from these tutorials, save the drawings to the
My Civil
Tutorial Data folder (page 819)
so that you do not overwrite the original drawings.
For more information, see the AutoCAD Civil 3D Help topic Understanding Surfaces.
Tutorial: Creating and Adding Data to a Surface
This tutorial demonstrates how to create a TIN surface, and then add contour,
breakline, and boundary data to the surface.
When you create a surface, its name is displayed in the Surfaces collection in
Toolspace on the Prospector tab. From this location, you can perform other
operations, such as adding data and editing the surface. When first created, the
surface is empty, so it is not visible in the drawing.
After data has been added to a surface, it becomes visible in the drawing in
accordance with the display settings specified in the referenced surface style.
TIN Surfaces
A TIN surface is composed of the triangles that form a triangulated irregular
network. A TIN line is one of the lines that makes up the surface triangulation.
To create TIN lines, AutoCAD Civil 3D connects the surface points that are
closest together. The TIN lines form triangles. The elevation of any point in the
surface is defined by interpolating the elevations of the vertices of the triangles
that the point lies in.
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