AUGIWorld Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 14) AUTOCAD CIVIL 3D Civil 3D Parcels for the Land Desktop User With my civil engineering roots tracing back to residential subdivision design, creating parcel layouts has always been among my favorite civil design topics. The end result of parcel design has largely remained unchanged, but the way we construct them has not. The differences between Land Desktop and AutoCAD® Civil 3D® parcel design are dramatic. But what are these differences, and how does one ensure the integrity of their Civil 3D parcel model? Before we answer that question, let’s first identify the procedural disconnect between Land Desktop and Civil 3D. As I present Civil 3D parcels to former Land Desktop users, I’ll often use the analogy of a pizza. When one sets out to bake a pizza, the natural start is with a dough ball. A couple tosses and toppings later we have a circular dough disk we call a pizza. Once baked, we take the pizza and divide it into multiple slices, or shall I say parcels? When baking a pizza it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bake it one slice at a time. Ironically, this is the way we have to define parcels using Land Desktop—one parcel at a time. Thankfully Civil 3D liberates us 14 from this practice, allowing us to start with the entire site and slice it into numerous parcels. The focus of this article is just parcels; however this reversal in procedure is seen in other parts of the software. Although it’s possible to import Land Desktop Parcels into Civil 3D; this practice can cause problems down the road. In Land Desktop each parcel is defined individually, thus a line shared by two parcels is actually stored twice (once for each parcel). Civil 3D, on the other hand, looks at a shared lot line as being but a single line. Civil 3D has been known to become a little temperamental when two parcel lines are drawn on top of one another. choose to classify my parcels as being either foundation, ROW, or design parcels. Civil 3D provides a number of out-of-the box drawing templates with a large number of Civil 3D Styles pre-defined for you. For the purposes of this article I will be using one of these pre-defined templates; “_AutoCAD Civil 3D (Imperial) NCS Extended.dwt”. Since the configuration Getting started So just how does one create the Civil 3D parcels? In essence there are three distinct ways to create parcels in AutoCAD Civil 3D: Create Parcel By Layout, Create Parcel By Object, and Create ROW. Which tool to use will naturally vary depending on the design task at hand. It is important to be very regimented in the way you begin defining parcels in Civil 3D, and for that reason I Figure 1: Define your site’ s boundary as your first parcel. w w w. A U G I . c o m http://www.AUGI.com
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