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Michael Kinnear/5 min read

Making Edits to Your Drainage Network: Adjusting Structures and Pipe Properties

Drainage Network Edit Checklist

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This tutorial walks through making edits to your drainage network: adjusting structures and pipe properties, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Now that we've placed our drainage network, what we're going to go ahead and do now is talk about some edits that you can make to your network once it's in place. So what we're going to do is look at one of the structures that I know has been placed incorrectly. I'm going to go in and look at this headwall.

First thing I'm going to go ahead and do is rotate this so that it’s properly aligned. But then the next thing I'm going to go ahead and do is select the two pieces here, my pipe and my headwall. And I'm going to go ahead and select this surface here so that I can see how this headwall is interacting with this pipe.

I'm going to go ahead and go to Object Viewer. And when I do that, and I bring this Object Viewer window over, and I zoom in on this area and rotate it out into three-dimensional space, what you're going to see is that my headwall is not displaying properly. Part of the pipe is coming in below.

And then the headwall is sticking out above, but it’s not outfalling into my basin. So what we have to do here is make some modifications to some of the pieces and parts. And the way that you modify these pieces and parts is you can select the piece that you want to modify.

And then you can make changes to it using the Contextual Ribbon Bar. So first I'm going to go to my structure. Now, I can make changes to this structure by right-clicking and selecting Properties, and then changing some of the information in here.

But a large portion of this information is going to be grayed out and unchangeable inside of here. So the other option that you can go to is you can go up into the Contextual Ribbon Bar and go to Structure Properties. So inside of Structure Properties, we have information about this specific part.

We have Part Properties, what the connections are coming into this part, and what the drop value is. These are rules that are set when we're creating these pipe networks.

So from here, I'm going to go to my Part Properties. I'm going to go ahead and go down here to my Part Data. And so from here, what I'm going to be looking at is what structure type I have and what my benching method is.

So I'm going to go ahead and change my structure type. I don't have a grated inlet or a curb inlet or a combination inlet or a manhole, but I do have an outfall. So I'm going to go ahead and select this as outfall.

I'm also going to change this benching method to a full bench. I'm going to fully bench this into my hillside.

So I'm going to change that to full bench, click Apply and then OK. Now from here, I'm going to go ahead and select this pipe. And from this pipe, I'm going to go ahead and go to the Pipe Properties.

Now, when Civil 3D created this network, it used part of this pipe and part of this headwall to pick an elevation for this pipe to outfall at. Now, when I look at this elevation for my start invert elevation, because the start is from here since we built it upslope from start to end going that direction, I see that this is at 165.24. Now, if I go to my Structure Properties, when I click on this structure and open Structure Properties, there is an item here at the top that says surface elevation at insertion point 166. That tells me this structure intersects the surface at 166.

So I know that this pipe needs to outfall at that elevation as well. I'm going to go ahead and select this pipe. I'm going to go to Pipe Properties, and I'm going to make a modification to that outfall elevation.

I'm going to change my start invert elevation to 166 and hit ENTER. Now I'm going to click Apply and then OK. Once I do that, if I go ahead and select this headwall, select this pipe and select this surface and go to Object Viewer, we’re going to go ahead and look and see what that change made to our drawing.

I'm going to go ahead and rotate this out, and I'm going to zoom in here. Now what we're seeing is this pipe is coming to the bottom of this detention basin and is discharging into the bottom of that detention basin. So I'm good with that.

So I'm going to go ahead and close. I am going to talk about a couple more edits that you have available to you inside of Civil 3D when you're dealing with these pipe networks. And so we have these Pipe Properties and Structure Properties as well as editing pipe networks, which brings up your toolbar.

From here, we have options for connecting parts, disconnecting parts, and swapping parts. So you can connect or disconnect parts from structures, and you can swap them with different parts. You can split up networks into multiple different networks.

You can merge different networks together. If you created one network and you want to connect it into another network, you can merge them. And then you can reset connections if a connection is broken.

So from there, I'm going to go ahead and escape. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to save my drawing.

And I'll meet you in the next video.