Here in Product Support, we all have certain features of the application that we naturally gravitate towards. For me, I love working on Surface related issues. After having to manually triangulate a Surface during that winter Land Surveying class I took my freshman year of college, you’d think I would be scared for life!
Anyways, we all know that Civil 3D has some incredible Surface functionality. Being able to change the Style on the fly to display elevation ranges and slopes is such a great tool. But what happens when you want to show all of that information at the same time. For example, your planset needs to show the Contours, the Slope Analysis, as well as the Elevation Analysis. And, they want to show them all on the same sheet. The Surface can only have a single Style assigned to it, so what is the best way to do this?
How about using the “Paste Surface” function? This works pretty slick. First, keep your original Surface on it’s own layer. Now, create new Surfaces for each of the Styles you want to display. In this example, I created three additional Surfaces: Overview, Slope, and Elevation.
Now paste the original Surface into each one of these. Keep each Surface on it’s own layer, and then assign the desired Style to each. Once that is done, you just use good ol’ layer management to freeze the Surfaces you don’t want to see in that Viewport.
Of course, since each of these new Surfaces look back to the original Surface for it’s data, any changes you make to the original Surface will then be reflected in the new Surfaces.
For good housekeeping, use Data Shortcuts if these Surfaces are large to keep your performance up.
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