Saving terrain as separate file

[kzuiderveld]

I generated a terrain of our building site by tracing over the iso-height lines of the site survey; CA correctly displays that data, we consider that the "before" situation. 

 

Now I'd like to use new iso-height lines to approximate what we'd like our terrain to be. This would be the "after" situation. 

 

Is there a way to easily switch between the terrain for "before" and "after"? Seems that CA only supports one terrain....

 

Thanks, Karel

[lbuttery]

Karel:

 

yes, only one terrain

 

copy the plan and make the changes

 

both plans can be sent to the layout as the before and after

 

Lew

[kzuiderveld]

18 hours ago, lbuttery said:

yes, only one terrain

As I suspected. Thanks, Lew!

[Evolution]

Just out of curiosity (which could kill this Kat)....would it be possible to have one terrain plan that shows the existing grades, insert PL at the point you want to change the grades from their existing elevations, to suit your construction site, preferred elevations? (convert them to terrain elevations) open their dbx, change their line style, say from dotted to solid, maybe even the color from say black to red, and have basically the same affect?  In my area (we do a lot of commercial) the site contractors want a site plan that shows existing and new contours on the same plan, and the above basic operation is what our local Civil E's do.  OF course they use different layers to show things like site utilities, parking etc., and so on. Just a thought.

[Chopsaw]

If you are working with elevation lines you can just select the line and make a copy of it and edit the copy for the new grade and then select the original one and convert it to a plain polyline and as Bob suggested change the style and colour and maybe even the layer to represent the original grade.  If you still need a 3D representation of the original grades save a copy of the plan file first.

[kzuiderveld]

On 1/17/2017 at 2:25 PM, Evolution said:

In my area (we do a lot of commercial) the site contractors want a site plan that shows existing and new contours on the same plan, and the above basic operation is what our local Civil E's do. 

Well, I started with imported the original site survey and then tracing over its contours to get the terrain iso-contours into CA. Since then, we modified the contours ourselves to approximate what we think the terrain will be (still not quite done with that). Since we have the original site survey still imported as an image, it'll be easy to create a plan that has the existing (survey) and new  (primary/secondary CA contours).

 

I'm a DIY and still climbing the learning curve - but I'm glad I don't have to use CA professionally as the software sometimes drives me nuts. Besides the inability to select pre/post terrain profiles, it also has the limitation of only showing the terrain at one specific floor. We want to have a kitchen garden on top of the garage, well, good luck modeling that if the terrain is associated a floor lower.... I very much appreciate the existence of chief talk that allows me to browse through the collective knowledge of CA users to find answers to some of my problems. 

 

Thanks to all!

[Chopsaw]

14 minutes ago, kzuiderveld said:

We want to have a kitchen garden on top of the garage, well, good luck modeling that if the terrain is associated a floor lower....

 

The terrain will show in all 3D views and elevations and if you need to see it in floor plan on a different floor you can use your "Reference Floor Display"

The learning curve is steep but just keep studying and asking questions and it will come. 

[kzuiderveld]

1 hour ago, Chopsaw said:

you can use your "Reference Floor Display"

Yeah, but conceptually a kitchen garden is not part of the terrain - it should be a collection of 3D objects placed on the deck above the garage. 

 

 Instead, I'm modeling the garden beds as a collection of rectangular railings with using soil as the floor finish - kind of works, except the soil bleeds through the walls in 3D view (as the floor finish is defined right to the edge of the bed) - that's called Z-fighting in computer graphics... Can be remedied by specifying an invisible wall just inside the framing of the bed, but man, it's workaround after workaround. I already verified I can drop plants on top of the soil though :-)

 

Thanks for the encouraging words, Chopsaw!