I am trying to figure out the surface area of a vertical face of a modular block wall. Is there some command within Carlson 2014 or Civil 3D 2014 that I can use to figure this out, or do I have to switch the elevations with the eastings in order to create a flat plane to find the surface area.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
3D Polyline Should Do It
Top of wall, bottom of wall, connect the ends.
Paul in PA
3D Polyline Should Do It
No slope area command that I can see.
My Earth Works software will do it.
> I am trying to figure out the surface area of a vertical face of a modular block wall. Is there some command within Carlson 2014 or Civil 3D 2014 that I can use to figure this out, or do I have to switch the elevations with the eastings in order to create a flat plane to find the surface area.
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance.
label the dimension, then get out the pencil and paper.
That's the check anyway.
Always be careful about any routines that claim to report back sloped surface areas.
Check and check again
You know the NAVCUBE that we all shut off?
Turn it on, select the 3D poly, and click the "front" face of the cube.
This will rotate the drawing window from "plan view" to "profile" view. By selecting that one 3D poly, you will hold the x-axis as the line.
You will now by looking at the wall, and do your area calc graphically.
Remember, we call it "Civil 3D" for a reason. 😉 also, since C3D is built on a complete AutoCAD platform, we have all the AutoCAD tools available to us as well. This procedure is really just setting a temporary user coordinate system (UCS) so you can do some 3D modeling.
Just because some developer didn't make a slick routine for a one-button solution, doesn't mean we should ignore the $7000 tool that we typically only use $325 worth of. 😀
Have fun, and the command to get back to WCS is PLANVIEW.
Craig
It sounds as if you have a vertical wall. What am I missing? If you shot reflectorless the top and bottom of the 4 corners, then subtracting the elevations would give you the height and inversing the points would give you the width, right? So then it's just a matter of multiplying the numbers together???
unfortunately it is an irregular curved wall with varying heights. I was hoping to avoid doing it this way because it will be extensive computations. However it may come down to that.
Thank you for the imput:-D
Excellent, thank you Craig I will give this a try when I get back to the office on Monday. Thanks.
Craig's idea will work if your wall is reasonably straight, as all of the dimensions and areas will be relative to the temporary UCS plane that you create. If your wall has significant curves and angles then you will need an alignment and profiles to project the wall face onto a flat plane.
Assuming that you have 3d polylines or featurelines connecting the points along the top and bottom of the wall then you can use this trick to create two alignments and two profiles. Once you've imported the xml file then create a profile view for each of the alignments - make sure that your profile view style has no vertical exaggeration. Finally, use the create superimposed profile command to project from the top profile onto the bottom alignment and measure the area.
Alternate solution.
Create a surface from the wall points and breaklines. Make sure that the surface boundary is limited to the wall face only. Open the Surface Properties dialog for this surface, and switch to the Statistics tab. You should be able to find the 3d surface area listed there.
My idea is to make the wall a 1 foot thick volume then the surface area will be the same as the cubic feet volume.