Creating Contours in Land desktop 2004, 2006, 2007, Civil3d 2009

Creating Contours in Land desktop 2004, 2006, 2007, Civil3d 2009

[Note] : If you are new to this topic. Visit here to see all the topics in order.

Once you have imported the points as we did in one of our tutorial post, you may now create contours or do many more things.

Here I will only be explaining simply how to create contours. To learn more about how to customize the contours click here (In process).

1. To create contours or work on the topographical map first you need to create a surface from the inserted points. Imagine that you have your 3d space coordinate points and you are placing a blanket over it with all the points touching the blanket. This blanket is the surface. Follow the steps to create the surface (blanket).
2. Go to [Terrain > Terrain Model Explorer]
3. Right click [Terrain > Create New Surface]

4. Expand the + sign in both Terrain folder and Surface1 folder.

5. Right click [Point Groups > Add Point Group...]
6. Select the point group that you had defined while importing points or while defining point groups and click ok.
7. Then you’ll return back to Terrain Model Explorer.
8. Now right click [Surface1 > Build...] to open Build Surface1 dialog box.
9. You may check Compute Extended Statistics in Build options frame if you want the details about you topographical map like 2d area, 3d area, etc. Leave other fields as it is.
10. Click Apply and Ok.
11. And a Done Building Surface dialog box appears. Click Ok.

12. Remember that whenever you do any change in your surface like, adding, removing points, creating, adding breaklines and others, you have to build your surface each time to see a change.
13. You can see the 2d, 3d area and other information of the surface at the Extended Surface Statistics at the bottom. You can see no. of points in surface, minimum and maximum elevations and other statistics shown to verify that everything is fine. Remember that there can be multiple surfaces in the same project defined by different point groups. But the one you are working right now should be made current by right clicking on the surface names. Once your desired surface is your current surface, it will have dark green icon.

14. Now you may close your Terrain Model Explorer.
15. Then once again goto [Terrain > Create Contours...] to open Create Contours dialog box.

16. Verify that your surface is shown on which you are working on. Verify the elevation range is showing the minimum and maximum R.L of your land. For the following example the land is steep sloped so minor interval is kept 2m. You may keep it as much is required. Remember that the more sloppy is the land, more is the contour interval. Keep major interval double of minor.
17. You may change the appearance of contours from the style manager button. But I’ll leave that to next tutorial.
18. Now click ok.
19. You’ll be asked to erase old contours? Type yes to erase if you already have old contours, else hitting yes or no results the same.
20. Hit yes and verify the contours being created.

Remain attached for labelling, editing contours and many more.... .

Do comment any Queries.

Land desktop 2004,2006,2007 and civil3d 2009 help topics

1. Preparing Data in format to insert in Land.
2. Creating New Project
3. Importing Points
4. Creating Contours
5. More to come, remain attached..

Importing Points in Land Desktop 2004

Importing points in land desktop 2004

After you create new project and drawing, follow these steps to import the points.

The points can have different formats like penzd (space delimited) which in *.txt format looks like:

“Space delimited” means the p,e,n,z and d columns are separated by space between them. If you choose “comma delimited” then your data must be separated by commas. To paste these coordinates in txt format you have to create these in excel and simply copy and paste the cells in notepad.  How to create these penzd points have already been discussed in the first part. Click here to view.

Click here to get the sample points.

1. Go to [Points > Import/Export points > import points]

2. In Format, enter the format of your data. For this example, dropdown the list and select PENZD (space delimited). In Source File, browse the location where you have saved the text file. Then check the Add Points to Point Group to add the points to a point group. Here you are asking land desktop to save the points in the group so that each time you want to work with the data, you don’t look for the original data but from the group defined. Enter a group name and click ok. Click ok again to exit the Format Manager.

3. In COGO Database Import Options, simply leave all fields as default and click OK.

4. Then you’ll see the following screen.

5. Enter Z  and E  i.e zoom extent the drawing to see the imported points.

6. The size of points will look relatively too huge. To solve this goto:

[Points menu > Edit points > Display properties]

7. Look at the command line:

Type A  to modify all the points.

8. Change the Color and Visibility to play with the appearance of the points. Next change the Text Size from default 5 to 1 units. Remember that the default unit is meter in Land desktop unlike mm in autocad, so 1 unit text size means 1 meters height. Next go to Marker tab and change the size to 1 units or any suitable height too.

Once done hit Ok and see the magic. Don’t forget to play with other options in the dialog boxes that I haven’t discussed here.

Finally, you should see your imported points like this.

By default, the yellow color is for serial number, red is for R.L of the point, and green is for description of the point. You can change the color or make the items invisible from the dialog box in step 8 above. Search the blog for more informations like creating contours, editing points and many more.
Do comment any queries.

Creating new Project in Land Desktop

Creating new Project in Land Desktop

1. Start Land Desktop 2004. Most probably you’ll see the following dialog box. Click on the new button. [New...]

     2.  If you don't see the above dialog box, goto file menu and click [New...] to open another dialog             box.

3. Click Create Project button as shown below. [Create Project...]

4. Then select Default[Meters] as Prototype for metric system or any other as suitable. Select a project path so that you can access all your project files like drawing, alignment, log etc inside the project path. Give a name and description if required and leave other fields as default. Remember that you can have multiple drawings under a single project. The “Drawing Path for this Project” is to determine where you want to keep your drawing, either inside /dwg folder of your project folder or you want to keep into your own(fixed path). Hit ok once you are done to return back to previous dialog box. [Prototype(Default meters) > Name(acadland) > Ok]

5. Then enter a name for the drawing,(Remember drawing is inside the project path under \dwg folder). You can see your project folder named acadland being created in C:\Land Projects 2004\ path or in the path that you’ve selected. Inside that folder you’ll see dwg folder where your drawings are located. All the information related and required for your project are stored under that acadland project folder. And don’t worry you can have your drawing name the same as your project folder name. [Name(acadland) > Select Drawing templates(acadiso.dwt) > Ok]

6. This step can be skipped as we shall manually set the scales and units or you may select the [m500.set(Metric, 1:500) > Next]

7. Verify metric units being selected as defaults, if not change them to as shown in the figure.

[Linear Units(meters) > Angle units(Degrees) > Angle Display Style(Bearings)> Next]

8. Click custom on both horizontal and vertical fields and provide 1 in both to set 1:1 scale.

Leave other fields as it is.[Drawing Scale > Horizontal(custom)(1) > Vertical(custom)(1) > Next]

9. Choose Nepal or whatever datum you are working in categories and click finish.

10. Finally verify your settings and click ok to complete the project and drawing setup.