LevisL Posted June 9, 2014 Share Posted June 9, 2014 On the project I'm currently working on, the client wants a walkout basement where we don't have enough slope in the grade to easily accomplish one. I'm trying to calculate cut and fill volumes to see if it's possible to make the walkout work by building up the grade on one side with the dirt excavated from the basement. Long story short, I tried calculating this manually and got really confused and frustrated, thinking there's gotta be a better way (not to mention quicker)! The cut volume was easy to figure out... area of basement x average depth into the ground, but then calculating fill volumes when the grade slopes down and away from the house and there's an existing cross-slope to deal with, well my eyes kinda crossed too!!! Just curious to know if any Chiefers out there have figured out a clever/workaround way of calculating cut and fill volumes with the tools we have in Chief. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LevisL Posted June 9, 2014 Author Share Posted June 9, 2014 Why does the terrain dbx have a volume that shows 0 cu.ft no matter what thickness you make it?! Just having that number would make it easy to calculate what I want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicinus Posted June 9, 2014 Share Posted June 9, 2014 I'm kind of a beginner but I would guess that dbx regards the polyline and not the actual solid? Have you tried clicking Next? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GerryT Posted June 9, 2014 Share Posted June 9, 2014 I've done this about a year ago and made a video on this. Essentially , you take cuts through the foundation using p- solids and following the terrain contour. i added macros to add up all the solids volumes to eliminate math errors. Works extremely well, if your careful and have only one slope direction. Two slopes (left-right & up/down) need to use solids subtraction -- so not good in that case. Typically takes about an hour -- so may not be "worth it" over a good guesstimate. Other than that, this has been a long requested feature. Don;t expect it any time soon!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LevisL Posted June 10, 2014 Author Share Posted June 10, 2014 Thanks for the reply Gerry. I had found your post in old ChiefTalk before posting on here (http://www.chieftalk.com/showthread.php?57706-Chief-Cut-Fill-Workaround), but unfortunately, the links to the videos no longer work. Would you mind re-posting them here if you still have them? If only Chief would give us the volume of the terrain, then one could note the volume before and after modifying the terrain and do a simple subtraction to calculate fill volume. Seems to me like it shouldn't be too difficult to extract that information from the terrain, but then again, I'm not a programmer! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GerryT Posted June 10, 2014 Share Posted June 10, 2014 old video was out of date -- so did a quick one. -- nothing special here. http://youtu.be/SmhyUEbt5iA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LevisL Posted June 10, 2014 Author Share Posted June 10, 2014 Thanks Gerry! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lbuttery Posted June 13, 2014 Share Posted June 13, 2014 Gerry: nice video but very tedious I agree, no reason that CA can't program Chief to do the calcs one question after placing the 20 slices you added breaks to adjust the PS to the terrain line then repeated that 20 times why not, adjust first one then replicate 20 times ??? Lew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GerryT Posted June 13, 2014 Share Posted June 13, 2014 Because every slice will have a slightly different terrain profile depending on the slope and "bumps" in the terrain at that slice (cross section). So everyone needs to be adjusted. Copying the first slice after creating a profile may or may not be quicker and closer to the other slices. Pick your poison. One thing I did not reinforce was the necessity to rebuild the terrain before any slice edit. Chief would say you do not need to do that,but I've seen some weird stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lbuttery Posted June 13, 2014 Share Posted June 13, 2014 Gerry: thanks Lew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RodCole Posted June 14, 2014 Share Posted June 14, 2014 This is one area where Chief does not really have the tools needed to do this type of work efficiently. For example, in TurboCAD Pro Platinum you can take the terrain exported from Chief as dot 3DS file and convert it to a solid and then it is relatively easy to subtract the foundation volume. One thing I have been tinkering with is trenching for utilities. I have a project now that I will be doing this on in the next week or two. Another very interesting thing that can be done with terrain is to slice it horizontally in and then extrude the profile in order to get a stepped terrain like you would get when building a cardboard model. This is also a bit tedious to do, but it can be worthwhile for the effect you get. Remember, this is not just a rough approximation of the terrain, it will slice the actual contours. For those who may be interested, I am refering to this a slice because that is what it is, but technically it is done using sectioning tools. Once this is done you can then import the modified terrain back into Chief as a Symbol if you want. I am finding that there are also many other interesting things that can be done with some good solid modeling tools that are currently available in other applications. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glennw Posted June 14, 2014 Share Posted June 14, 2014 Another very interesting thing that can be done with terrain is to slice it horizontally in and then extrude the profile in order to get a stepped terrain like you would get when building a cardboard model. This is also a bit tedious to do, but it can be worthwhile for the effect you get. Remember, this is not just a rough approximation of the terrain, it will slice the actual contours. For those who may be interested, I am refering to this a slice because that is what it is, but technically it is done using sectioning tools. Once this is done you can then import the modified terrain back into Chief as a Symbol if you want. I am finding that there are also many other interesting things that can be done with some good solid modeling tools that are currently available in other applications There are also lots of things that can be done with Chiefs tools. Why go to other programs when you can do it directly in Chief? This is done very easily in Chief. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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