AUGIWorld Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 16) intersections. With the correct values in place, press [Ok] and watch Civil 3D do its magic! 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. 5. The “Create Parcels” dialog will appear once again where you can tell Civil 3D how to illustrate your parcels. 6. You will be prompted to “Pick a point within the parcel to be subdivided;” simply click anywhere within the desired parcel. 7. Now we will tell Civil 3D the frontage in which to create parcels. After selecting a start point, a fat line will appear over your existing parcel. Use your cursor to drag this line along your frontage. 8. With your frontage defined, Civil 3D will prompt you for an angle at frontage. Figure 4: Civil 3D automatically offsets your alignment and does basic intersection cleanup. Land Desktop offered little help outside the standard AutoCAD commands for laying out individual parcels. A scenario as common as creating a series of parcels with a frontage of 100 feet was tedious, to say the least. The Civil 3D Parcel Layout Tools offer a vast improvement over the primitive tools from the past. Creating a series of parcels using Civil 3D can be done as follows. Laying out parcels Figure 6: Series of parcels created based on specified parameters. the Civil 3D Parcel Layout tools are smart, and can be slid along the defined frontage all the while keeping their perpendicular relationship. The Parcel Layout Tools are indeed powerful, though the fun doesn’t have to stop there. Every square foot of your site is represented by a parcel object in Civil 3D, so we can run some impressive reports. Suddenly many of the basic lot area calculations for a site can be done in a matter of seconds. Although Civil 3D requires that we reverse the way we approach parcels, with a little practice the time savings will likely be calculated by the hour. Donnie Gladfelter is the Design Systems Specialist for Timmons Group; an ENR 500 design and consulting firm headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, with offices throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Backed by more than a decade of CAD experience, he is jointly responsible for the development and delivery of training, support, and CAD standards for their more than 200 CAD users. He can be reached at donnie.gladfelter@timmons.com, or through his CAD Blog online at www.TheCADGeek.com. w w w. A U G I . c o m Figure 5: Expanding the Create Parcel By Layout toolbar allows design parameters to be specified. 1. Go to “Parcels > Create Parcel By Layout” 2. The “Parcel Layout Tools” toolbar will appear, which should be expanded using the [Insert Figure Down Arrow.tif] on the right. 3. To create a series of parcels of a given frontage, use the “Minimum Frontage” parameter and turn “Automatic Mode” on. 4. Use the “Slide Angle Create” command (fifth button from left) 16 Although it is not indicated at the command line, the default is 90°. Assuming you want your lot lines perpendicular to your frontage, you can just hit [Enter]. Another Parcel Layout tool which has proven it to be especially handy is the “Free Form Create” command. It works much like the “Slide Angle Create” command, but allows you to specify the location of each parcel line graphically. As an added bonus, Parcel Lines created using http://www.TheCADGeek.com http://www.AUGI.com
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