By Justin Doughty
A very common issue with Civil 3D design is when linework is used to generate a Surface or Grading, and the resulting Surface doesn’t seem to match exactly as expected.
Usually the best way to resolve issues like this, is to add extra points, to give a better definition to the final design.
When Breaklines are added to a Surface in Civil 3D, there is an option to add supplementing factors, which will add extra points at the given distance for straights and mid-ordinate distance for curves:
However, an issue may only present itself after the surface has been created, or there may be the need to edit the Featureline manually afterwards.
This is really easy to do, and will improve the definition of surfaces and grading.
Pick the Featureline, then from the Ribbon use Insert Level Point, then in the command line select Increment, and set this to 1m:
In the above example we see that when the Featureline is selected, the surface contours are only following the points of the Featureline, not the entire curve/line.
In the below example of a Featureline used for grading, there again is not enough definition to the Featureline. There are large gaps between the geometry points. This can be fixed in the same way: