Monday, September 17, 2012

Level of Detail

Over the last few weeks, I have had a few clients that have voiced concerns over performance issues when editing large surfaces.  One way to deal with this issue is by the Level of Detail command.


The command give the user the ability to change the level of detail on a surface based on the zoom distance. What this means is that the more zoomed out, the more simplified the surface will be, and conversely the closer you are, the more detailed.  


When you start the command the first time, the capture above will let you know that you have entered detail mode.  The image below show the icon that will appear in the top left corner of model space once the command has been invoked.


This command, which was added into the 2012 product, will make dealing with large surfaces much improved.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Creating a Spillway

A common practice when creating a detention basin is to create a spillway or a similar channel to control the location and release of water.  In the following, I will show how to add a spillway to the basin design.


As you can see from the screen capture above, here is a detention basin with a high water elevation of 176.  Now we need to create a feature line that represent the location of our spillway.  It is important that this feature line is in a different site from the detention basin, that way it will not react with the pond grading.


In the capture above, you can see that an elevated feature line representing the spillway has been created.  We will then create a grading group for the spillway, and use the grade to surface method and target the proposed detention basin.



In the two screen captures above, you can feature line has created the spillway,  The bottom capture shows the spillway in a 3d perspective.  It is important to note, that the infill option needs to be used to close the bottom of the spillway.  Also, if for some reason the spillway needs to change location, we simply move it to its new area, and the spillway will be updated.

Finally, now that the spillway and detention basin are created, we simply need to make a new surface and paste both surfaces together.