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.