Civil Immersion

Calculating a Stockpile Volume from Point Cloud Data using Civil 3D

Today's drone technology makes it easy to collect existing site conditions as a point cloud.  Once captured, point clouds provide a wealth of analytic opportunities.  In this week’s installment, we'll use Civil 3D to analyze a point cloud and extract the volume of a large stockpile.

If your projects require you to calculate stockpile volumes, try experimenting with a point cloud workflow.  Capturing stockpiles as point clouds can be the fastest and safest means of collecting this data, while also providing more detail than what is obtainable using more traditional collection methods.

If you are interested, I’ve created a quick video below to help you get started…

-Jeff

Finish Strong Friday: Utilizing Survey Monument GIS Data in Infraworks

For this week's video, I thought I would stay with the same theme and utilize some survey monument GIS data inside Autodesk Infraworks.  I show some tips for moving attributes from the SHP file to the Infraworks database.  I also show using some of these attributes as tooltips.

Check out the video below to see this in action.

-Alan

Migrating a Surface Model from InfraWorks to Civil 3D

Using the “Point Cloud Terrain” feature, InfraWorks makes it easy to extract a bare earth surface from a point cloud.  Extracted surfaces are a perfect way to add detail to an existing conditions model.  InfraWorks then makes it easy to share these surfaces with other Autodesk applications, providing countless opportunities to analyze, visualize, and sample the data.

In this week’s installment, we’ll explore a workflow to migrate an existing ground surface (built from aerial imagery) from InfraWorks to Civil 3D.  If you are interested, I’ve created a quick recording below that walks through everything…

-Jeff

Finish Strong Friday: Utilizing Survey Monument GIS Data in Civil 3D

As many of you know, the Map 3D FDO tools for connecting to various GIS databases and file stores are very powerful and luckily-are included with Civil 3D.  Recently, I was talking with a customer about grabbing published survey monument data and bringing it into a Civil 3D project.  Based on this discussion, I thought this might be of interest to others who may not be completely familiar with the GIS tools available in Civil 3D/Map 3D; hence this post.

Check out the video below to see this in action.

-Alan